Sequels are a notoriously difficult thing to pull off, and Riven is an example of an unequivocal success. It took Myst’s design and built upon it rather than simply aping it, creating a completely fresh take on the existing concept. Beyond the continued storyline and identical control scheme, there is practically no resemblance between the two. It isn’t so much Myst II as it is Myst 2.0– a second release which corrects the shortcomings of an earlier version. Riven is a masterpiece, an example of what can happen when creators consider their past mistakes, aim high, and ignore the risks.

Riven’s intro picks up where Myst’s great anticlimax left off. In Atrus’s previous appearance, he spoke of another foe and mentioned that Katran was being held prisoner in an unnamed age. (For the sake of consistency, I will be referring to Catherine as Katran at all times.) Following a delightfully artistic new Cyan logo, we again see Atrus sitting at his desk. Rand Miller’s acting here hits a degree of subtlety that I don’t think he ever quite reached again: Atrus’s relief at seeing the Stranger again is clearly visible, but there’s also a palpable undercurrent of worry in his voice. There are innumerable ways that Atrus’s plan could backfire, and Rand’s performance conveys his feelings perfectly.

The seriously flawed linking panel is further cause for alarm: we know from Myst what those panels are supposed to look like, and the flickering, noisy image imbues a subtle dread in the player. As it fills the screen and is replaced by the Riven logo, we are primed. We  don’t know what we’re about to see, but we sense that it’s going to be a wild ride.

Likewise, our first experience in Riven itself is a carefully-orchestrated glimpse into the chaos of the Age. The immediate appearance of cage bars is far removed from the inviting vistas we’ve become accustomed to in Atrus’s ages, and speaks volumes not only about Gehn’s suspicious nature but also the degree to which he’s prepared for any contingencies. Before we can give much thought to escaping, however, we meet another character: Cho, Gehn’s minion. He stammers incoherently, relieves us of the trap book needed to capture Gehn, and then suddenly clutches his neck and collapses. After a lengthy pause he’s dragged away and we catch a brief glimpse of a man in bizarre camouflage, who silently lets allows us out of the cage before slipping away. The whole thing is over so quickly we hardly know how to react, and it summarizes Riven’s unstable status quo quite neatly.

It’s also important to recall that in the previous game, we practically never saw human beings in the flesh. This absence of living humans often imparted a feeling of invulnerability to the player; a sense that even in the most disturbing environments nothing can happen to you. When we’re physically accosted by a person within seconds of arriving on Riven, that assumption is immediately dismissed. The familiar feeling of safety from the original game is replaced with a sort of hanging dread: there are people on Riven, some of them are hostile, and they could be anywhere.

So, while we’re on the subject of hostile people, let’s stop and talk about Gehn for a bit. Moreso than any other game in the series, Riven is about one specific character. Riven is Gehn’s age, Gehn’s prison, Gehn’s burden. It is his life, his creation, and his toy box. In the Myst review I talked about how Sirrus and Achenar’s characters are revealed by their effect on the Ages, but Riven takes this principle even farther, because Gehn does more than just leave his fingerprints on Riven: he tears it apart from the top down, rebuilding it according to his whims. The very landscape, therefore, becomes his symbol, and the relationship between Gehn and Riven is the most complex part of the game’s story.

The Golden Dome is perhaps Riven’s most visible landmark; a massive, shining thing that’s visible from nearly everywhere. Since most of the inhabitants of Riven aren’t allowed to go anywhere near the thing, most who see it will understand it only as a symbol of Gehn’s power and inscrutability. The player, however, eventually learns the Dome’s true purpose: to serve as a housing for Gehn’s generator system. The generator consists of two components: a big piston-like thing perhaps eight feet tall, and a boiler about the size of a Volkswagon. The entire assembly is perhaps a hundredth the size of the Dome, if that. So there’s absolutely no practical reason for the Dome exist at all; it is simply a facade Gehn throws up to impress his subjects. Gehn is a pharaoh–both a god and a king, and thus has needs beyond those of gods or kings. The Dome is his pyramid, a structured commissioned by a human king but representative of superhuman godhood. Since Gehn has been effectively stripped of all his godlike powers at this point, the Dome’s arresting existence serves as a physical reminder of his omnipotence. It is perhaps the most striking symbol of Gehn’s relationship to Riven.

Another very important symbol of this relationship is the wooden number-learning game we find in Riven’s small schoolroom. The game is designed to teach a rudimentary understanding of the D’ni numeral system: each time the game is activated, a D’ni numeral appears in a window, and one of two hapless figurines are lowered closer to the jaws of a wahrk-inflicted death, the degrees of their descent describing the number. The “wahrk gallows,” we come to understand, are Gehn’s preferred method of execution. Victims are lowered, head-down, into water-filled pens where they are eaten alive by Riven’s alpha predator, the Great Wahrk. The Rivenese reverence for the Wahrk is clear: they view it with a mixture of admiration and fear, and we’re given the impression that it was their primary god before Gehn’s arrival. Gehn’s appropriation of the Wahrk is typical of his pragmatic and callous approach to everything; the people view the Wahrk as important, so Gehn simply styles himself as being the Wahrk’s master and uses its dramatic power to instill fear in his subjects. That this imagery works its way into a humble teaching tool is telling. Gehn never passes up any opportunity to remind the people of his primary axioms: I am Gehn. I am your creator and ruler. You are nothing to me.

Moving beyond Gehn for a bit (to the degree that we can considering that he’s everywhere), let’s talk about the islands. The game starts and ends on Temple Island, right in the shadow of the Golden Dome (although most people probably don’t notice it right away since the game’s navigation system discourages looking upward). Temple Island’s primary features are its titular temple, the Golden Dome, the Gateroom, and (of course) the Star Fissure, which is covered over and not really recognizable as such until the end of the game. The Gateroom is primarily a puzzle, but it’s also a sort of mini-temple, adorned with some of Gehn’s symbols and a series of stained-glass images describing Gehn’s “defeat” of Atrus, subsequent rule, and (apparently) his ultimate ascent to Heaven. The Gateroom is off-limits to anyone outside of Gehn’s elite, but he never hesitates to preach to the converted. The main temple is likewise exclusive to his own staff, but he still sets up a complex hologram projector allowing him to appear as a larger-than-life phantasm when he wants to. Temple Island’s primary function is to assert Gehn’s superiority, which is ironic considering it is also the site of his original defeat.

From Temple Island we travel to Jungle Island, the one part of Riven where the natives are still allowed to go. Jungle Island is by far the largest of the game’s islands, and is the setting of much of the game’s story. The Rivenese village is impressive, but we learn quickly how fearful the people have grown under Gehn’s rule, watching as they sound the alarm and scurry away every time we arrive. We also see the fingerprints of the Moiety here, their trail of wooden eyes leading the way to their secret Age. The Rivenese wildlife is also most in evidence here, and we become familiar with the local flora and fauna to a degree not seen in the later games. Exile’s Edanna has more-numerous distinct species perhaps, but they’re all so whimsical that they tend to push suspension of disbelief a bit too far. Riven’s wildlife, by contrast, is both a background and a puzzle element: while we learn about the beetles and sunners, we also come to recognize things like the fruit-bearing “mushrooms” and the little red flowers that grow beside the volcanic chasms. (In one particularly inspired detail, these flowers also appear as offerings in Gehn’s temple, the great risk required to obtain them symbolic of the giver’s devotion.) We also get a taste for the villager’s reverence for the landscape compared to Gehn’s cavalier industrialization: the villagers are so close to their environment that animals were a natural subject for the Moiety’s combination lock, but to Gehn the entire jungle just represents so much raw material to be thrown in his grinder. Jungle Island is perhaps the game’s strongest arena; the place where the interests of Gehn, the villagers, the Moiety, and the Age itself play against each other in the most visible ways.

The other two islands, Survey and Crater, are the lesser part of the game’s four main locations. They aren’t less beautiful or less interesting than Temple or Jungle, they’re just so strictly assigned to Gehn’s research that we don’t see much of the conflict relationship between Gehn and the other characters. Still, they’re home to some of the game’s most striking imagery: the copper-saturated lake, the golden elevator, the giant stone spikes, the Wahrk viewing chamber–and, naturally, the Wahrk itself. The primary gameplay function of these islands is to provide information needed to solve the game’s two uber-puzzles, the Moiety Cave and the “Waffle Iron.” The way this information is doled out is really quite ingenious, as all of the information sources are designed to have in-universe functionality as well. The map room, from a gameplay perspective, exists only to show the player where the Firemarble Domes are, but from an in-universe perspective it’s also part of Gehn’s survey equipment, used to track the gradual drift of Riven’s islands. These two islands exemplify the designers’ attention to detail, taking necessary gameplay clues and presenting them within something inherently interesting.

However, this leads me to the elephant (or, perhaps, the Wahrk) in the room: Riven’s two uber-puzzles are just too hard. Both are based upon principles of gathering and applying information, but neither clearly specify what kind of information they need. This is particularly true of the Waffle Iron: to get the combination right requires the player to learn two different symbols for each island (the pixel outline and the dome eye symbol), a color associated with each island (one of which is broken), and the location of each firemarble dome…and none of this is ever stated outright. The player is just expected to guess that the Waffle Iron is looking for the dome positions, and the color-coding system still requires significant trial and error beyond that. The entire puzzle is dependent on so many different factors that it’s easy to get it wrong even when you know the principle of the solution–a principle which, I reiterate, is never stated outright. The Moiety Cave is somewhat better conceived–the concept of the eye sequence is not difficult to follow, and it’s easy to match the animals to their vocalizations and corresponding petroglyphs. There’s still the matter of the missing piece, though…the Fish eye can only be seen out-of-context on Gehn’s desk. The only “clues” associating it to fish are its location in the middle of the lake and the fact that it appears in the middle of a fish-shaped shadow when viewed from a certain angle… and it’s barely visible in either case. While these puzzles do make sense in-universe, they take things a bit too far to be actually feasible as gameplay. Some people have decoded them without help, I’m sure, but for most players they’re a trip straight to the cheat guide, and whenever that happens it means something has gone wrong with the game design.

On the subject of game design, there’s a major but subtle difference between Myst and Riven. In Myst, we begin with no knowledge of the story and we must uncover it piece by piece. Riven, by contrast, starts us off with pretty much the entire story spelled out: Gehn thought he was a god, so Atrus trapped him on Riven, and then Katran got trapped there later. Anyone who hasn’t read The Book of Atrus will, naturally, be a little behind on this, but the game quickly brings them up to speed with the journals. This approach means that instead of learning a story by witnessing its aftermath, we instead witness the aftermath of a story we already know. The effect this has on the player’s interpretation of the content is worth considering. I don’t know that Myst’s approach would have worked as well in sprawling environments like Riven; there’s just too much to take in without some idea of the context. Delivering the backstory ahead of time gives the player a head start to understanding the environment.

For all the strengths of Riven’s backstory, though, its “frontstory” is practically nonexistant. Given that Riven is an inhabited, and therefore active, environment, one might expect there to be a fair amount going on in the game’s “present day.” Instead the entire environment seems to exist largely in stasis. No one is operating Gehn’s paper factory, the schoolroom is abandoned, and we never witness any event of consequence. There are a few minor details which imply activity, such as Gehn’s gun and pipe disappearing from his laboratory, the fleeing scribe, and the infamous “girl in the jungle,” but for the most part nothing seems to be happening. The only current event we hear about is Gehn’s work on the “sanctuary for the villagers.” Later, in Myst III and IV, we will see a more conscious effort made to involve the player in an unfolding storyline, but Riven, for all its successes, falls short in this department. That said, this shortcoming is eclipsed by the virtuosity with which the game presents the story assets it has. Players are unlikely to notice that there’s no real storyline, as they’re too engrossed in the trappings of the backstory.

In the previous essay, I promised we’d be looking at Katran in more depth, so here we go: Katran is one of the most intriguing characters of the series. After leaving Riven at the end of The Book of Atrus she submitted herself to what amounted to voluntary exile, leaving her homeland forever to seek a new life of adventure and exploration. In doing so she also condemned her people to become the permanent subjects of a tyrant in the interest of protecting strangers from becoming his victims. Meanwhile, her own life brought its own complications. An accident lead her to develop a phobia for Linking, thus effectively ending her own Writing and explorations, making her little better than a prisoner on Myst Island. When she finally makes her way back to her own people (as the result of being hoaxed by her own sons), she discovers that even among them she’s now an exile, having been remade into a messiah figure. Katran is perennially of two worlds, and being so split surely leads to a deeply complex state of mind. We get some sense of this from her Riven journal, but for the most part Katran’s character seems distanced from us. This is, I suspect, because Myst’s storytelling relies upon the examination of peoples’ personal spaces, and we never actually see any of Katran’s personal spaces. The closest we come is her (shared) bedroom in Myst IV, which has practically no decoration worth a second thought. Tomanha’s botany lab is implied to be one of her haunts, too, but again, there’s not much there that could describe any character trait beyond an interest in plants. Neglecting Katran, a character who is in many ways far more interesting than Atrus, is one of the greatest tragedies of the entire series. Her journals in Riven and Myst IV are about as close as we ever come to learning about her, but it’s too little too late. Her in-the-flesh appearance in Riven is fairly strong; Sheila Goold portrays her as enigmatic and even a little threatening, which in my opinion is a much better interpretation than the overly-jolly mother we see her as in Myst III. But even so, we can’t escape the fact that Katran is effectively in a Rapunzel situation on Riven, literally pacing around a small cell waiting for someone to save her. Even in a game set in her own homeland, Katran ends up getting sold short.

The character stealing the whole show, of course, is Gehn. We’ve discussed his relationship to the land already, but we still need to take a look at the man himself. Gehn is a similarly complex character to Katran, but unlike Katran, his complexity is fairly visible. The question which recurs throughout the game is whether Gehn has “changed” or whether he’s still “the man he once was.” This begs the question, naturally: who was Gehn before? He’s fairly one-dimensional as seen in The Book of Atrus: a power-crazed maniac and dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist who sees his own son as little more than a means to an end. He believes that he’s a god despite all evidence to the contrary and expects constant submission from the peoples he visits. His ultimate goal is to resurrect the D’ni civilization and rule the universe. Is his depiction in Riven any different? All these traits are on display, yes, but we begin to see more shades of Gehn’s character as well, particularly in his long monologue upon first visiting his private age, in which he expresses a multitude of regrets and explicitly claims to have changed. Furthermore, he has actually accepted some degree of responsibility for the Rivenese, albeit of a callous “white man’s burden” variety, working sincerely and dutifully on a new Age for them to escape to. While much of his humility is insincere, even false humility is a new thing for Gehn as we previously understood him. The way Gehn’s appearance is handled is fascinating: we build up a mental image of him, and of his personality, based on what we’ve read, heard, and seen, but meeting him face-to-face reveals him as a real person, not just the evil caricature we imagined.  This is further reinforced by his private journal, particularly the barely-legible passage in which he mourns the death of his wife. Indeed, Gehn’s complexity as a character is so pronounced that I often feel downright dirty carrying him around in a book after he’s captured, and more than a little annoyed at Atrus that he’d find such a fate acceptable.

Strangely enough, following only the “intended” (ie, winning) narrative of the game gives a somewhat narrower view of Gehn than we can see otherwise. Riven is a rare case in which the “bad endings” actually contribute significantly to one’s understanding of the characters. In any of the other games, the bad endings have no more depth than “whoops! shouldn’t have trusted the villain!” but Riven’s are somewhat different, in part because we’re never actually asked to trust Gehn. The bad endings are all reached by various misunderstandings of instructions, whether they involve calling Atrus at the wrong time, misusing the Trap Book, or disregarding Gehn’s warning not to try his patience. The Big Choice is here depends on our understanding of the Trap Book concept, assuming that the we’ve read Atrus’s journal and understand that when Gehn uses the book we’ll be released again. We’re never given the opportunity to choose between Gehn’s word and a “good guy’s” word, so there is no “sorry, you chose Gehn” ending. Instead, the bad endings reveal nuances of Gehn’s character that we don’t get to see otherwise, and establish that while he has changed, he has also stayed the same. We do get some sense of this when we see him pack his gun before using the Trap Book, but seeing him disown and kill Atrus in the worst of all the bad endings shows just how deep his hatred still runs. And yet, to me, the most chilling ending of them all is the one in which he kills the player out of impatience, calmly explaining, “You see? I have changed. There was a time when I might have let you live.” If you never have, I encourage you to check out all the bad endings. While they aren’t, in a continuity sense, “true,” watching them against the lies of Gehn’s monologue tells more about his character than anything else in the game.

So we capture Gehn and release Katran (who then proceeds to start breaking everything), thus initiating the endgame. The pacing here is quite adept; it takes a long time to get to this point, but the game doesn’t drag its feet to the ending. Katran’s destructiveness, while it doesn’t exactly make sense in context, does serve to force the player to the only place still worth going: the telescope on Temple Island. The solution to the telescope puzzle is spelled out pretty clearly in Katran’s journal, so it’s a simple matter to break the glass and invoke the outtro movie. While Myst had a non-ending, Riven’s ending is superb, showing us the both payoff of our actions and the foreshadowed destruction of Riven. Still, watching Riven start to collapse around us is pretty alarming, especially given that Katran isn’t there yet. Seeing them reunite at what seems to be the last second is a relief, and Katran’s hesitant link-away is a touching moment.

The one sour note of the whole thing is that the Fissure doesn’t really seem quite as safe as Atrus believes it is. While the characters maintain that it has a breathable atmosphere, it must be thin at best given the intense vacuum effect we witness when it opens. Atrus seems to think it’s safe just because it delivered his Myst book safely, but a book can withstand significantly more beating than a human body. Using the Fissure is a leap of faith at best, but since the decision isn’t even ours to make, it’s more of a “fall of faith.” The game does its best to reassure us about the Fissure’s safety, but if I was really there (and these games always encourage you to imagine you are) I’d be pretty upset about this arrangement.

Atrus’s closing monologue, as we watch Riven drift away, echoes the opening of Myst and ends the game on a soft, pensive note. The appearance of the credits, accompanied by one of Robyn Miller’s catchier themes, brings a note of finality to the story. Really, the entire series could have ended here. It’s as strong an ending as you could want.

Riven isn’t perfect. It has some shortcomings, and I’m certainly not about to argue that it’s somehow universally accessible. It’s more like an “art-house film,” filled with complexities for those who want to look for it, but requiring more patience to fully unlock than most people are willing to invest. The surface of the game is rich on its own, but an even greater degree of depth is opened to anyone willing to look at it in detail. That is its greatest strength, and that is what makes Riven come alive more than any other installment of the series.

Notes

• While Gehn’s fingerprints are prominent in-universe, Richard Vander Wende’s influence is the most visible from a production perspective. While he didn’t create the game single-handedly, his work on the story and atmosphere is so pervasive that the whole thing seems to have been lifted straight out of his imagination. I don’t know the circumstances of his separation from the series, but had he stayed on, the series would likely have been very different. On the other hand, it might have just made the later games more like Riven, and while that would hardly be a bad thing, it would have made Riven itself less unique.
• As pointed out in one game walkthrough on YouTube, Atrus and Katran can both somehow see that Gehn is inside the Trap Book, even though we can’t see anything. Luckily Gehn can’t seem to tell if the book is occupied, either, or the whole thing would have been for naught.
• There’s a crucial weakness to the Fire Marble Domes’ design: two people working in tandem could easily break into a dome. One would sit in front of the combination lock and the other would press the button on the scope, causing the dome to close. Whoops!
• The Moiety’s portable linking-book-enhancer highlights an amusing difference between Gehn and Katran’s characters. Katran improvises the device into her new world, as is her style, but once Gehn finds out about it he assumes that it was something she read about somewhere, as would be his style.
• Where did Cyan Find Sheila Goold (Katran) and John Keston (Gehn)? Goold still has hardly any credits to her name fifteen years later, and Keston’s only IMDB entry is for Riven. They’re both capable actors. Who are they? Where did they come from? Where are they going?
• Despite having written over 4,000 words, there are still an endless number of things I didn’t even touch on, particularly the significance of the number 5. It’s fun to watch it recur in the game, as it tends to pop up in the weirdest places–including, of course, the game’s five discs. Gehn says that 5 was important not just to him but to the D’ni–but strangely enough it doesn’t seem to appear at all in Uru.
• Gehn’s personal effects, namely the imager and the photographs of Aitrus and Nelah, seem a little odd when you consider that he must have already brought them to Riven when he was stranded there. The photographs are small enough, but does he really bring that bulky imager everywhere? Also telling: he doesn’t have a photograph of Anna.
• I played Riven on my Linux machine this time, using Wine. Everything worked perfectly except the combination lock on Prison Island. That was pretty annoying.
• Am I the only one who can’t stop clicking on the sink in Gehn’s bedroom? I find that endlessly entertaining.
• The one thing that really dates this game is the resolution, particularly in the live-action sequences, in which peoples’ faces are often too blurry to even make out. I’d pay good money for an HD release instead of the recent cell phone version. (I know this would take tons and tons of re-rendering, but maybe it could be worked out somehow… computers are much faster than they were in 1997.)
• The graphics themselves, I should note, are still quite lovely. If the game were made today there would be more polygon definition in the rock face, but for the most part Riven trumps even Myst IV in realism. It’s mostly those famous Santa Fe textures, I think.

Next time: Myst: The Book of D’ni

Screenshots property of Cyan Worlds.

1. I started by modeling a simple slide carousel in Blender, which took only a few minutes. I only needed the shapes, not the lighting, so I rendered it with some shadeless materials, thusly:
2. I then used Illustrator’s auto-tracing function to get the shapes from the render. Since the source image was very high-contrast, the tracer did a great job for once. At this stage I also drew in many of the simpler shapes, primarily circles.
3. Finally, I imported the Illustrator file into Inkscape to apply gradient fills, because Illustrator’s gradient tools are a leading cause of brain cancer in graphic designers. (It’s true!) The slide dividers benefit nicely from some clever banded circular gradients, to give this final result:

Not bad! Had I tried to draw this from scratch in Illustrator, I’d probably still be working… instead it took less than half an hour, and is about as photoreal as vector graphics can be.

This is a fateful date. You are probably already aware that it is Pi Day (especially so at 1:59) but it is also, coincidentally, the day that the Zarks were born. For it was on Pi Day in 2002 that I happened to create, almost absent-mindedly, a creature called a Zark to serve as a bit enemy in the embarrassingly-titled comic Space Kid. I’ve related this story a million times before, so I’ll just give the synopsis:

1. Zarks turn out to be cooler than Space Kid
2. Zarks gradually take over comic
3. Zarks go on to star in video games and stuff

And so, to celebrate the first ten years of Zarkdom, I present the following show of rare and/or unseen images from their storied lineage. And if that’s not enough, I also offer you a digital copy of the complete Zirconius comics, a guide to the Easter Eggs of Into the Titan, and some old backstory: Maz’s journal. (Links are below the fold.) Share and enjoy.

The Slideshow

There’s More!

• To download a PDF of Zirconius: The Complete Original Series, click here. (27.2 MB) If you enjoy the book, please consider buying a print edition, which I assure you are quite lovely.
• To read Maz’s journal and to find out about the easter eggs of Into the Titan, please visit the official Titan page.

That’s all folks! Thanks for looking…see you back here in 2022.

So, they’ve appropriated a character who preaches not just an environmental message, but also an anti-consumerism message, and they’re using him in advertisements. Advertisements! Advertisements for cars! I don’t care if he is fictional… this is slander.

And, on a side note, how do you make a movie out of Dr. Seuss and get a PG rating? Actually, forget asking how, what about why? Also who, when and where. Someone has to account for this whole travesty.

Myst: The Book of Atrus was published in 1995, well into the heyday of the original Myst but still two years before the release of Riven. It appears to set two basic goals for itself: to expand the backstory of the original game and set the stage for the new one. The book is credited to Rand and Robyn Miller, Myst’s foremost creators, with coauthor credit to David Wingrove, an SF writer previously known for Chung Kuo, a sprawling epic about a future in which Imperial China rules the world. (In true diehard-fan fashion, I attempted to read the first of these volumes, with no success.) As a work of literature, the novel is probably slightly better than your average science fiction novel, at least stylistically. As a part of the Myst canon, this novel (and the other two) form a sort of backstory-bible, one which became so integral to the series that the games eventually came to depend on it.

I must begin by saying a few words about the prose and style of the book. I don’t know who’s ultimately responsible, Wingrove or the Millers, but some of the writing tends toward a strange kind of triteness. The characters often speak (both aloud and inwardly) with an awkward properness that sounds not unlike an American’s conception of a stereotypical British person: “‘I hoped the trapdoor would be open, but it looks like we shall have to force our way in.’” (Gehn, pg. 116). Internal monolgues tend to be even worse, combining the same robotic phrasing with bizarrely exaggerated emphases: “A girl. It was a girl. … What in Kerath’s name was she doing? Then, with a little jolt, he understood. Washing! She was washing! That little mound beside her was a pile of sodden clothes!” (p. 145) Unless Atrus has some hitherto-unmentioned fascination with laundry, there’s no way those three exclamation points are justified. There’s also a lot of description, which is not necessarily bad, but it’s of a particularly lifeless variety that basically lists the objects that are present and nothing more. Granted, vibrant description is very hard to write, but in a series revolving around books of vibrant description, I’d have liked to see more of an effort made. Still, the vast majority of people reading these books are probably not stylistic nitpickers like myself, and admittedly it’s still better written than most novelizations I’ve seen.

That out of the way, let’s move on to the story content. The Book of Atrus opens with characters we’ve never seen before, Gehn and Anna. Gehn’s wife (here unnamed) has just died in childbirth and he’s distraught. He spurns his newborn son, storms in the direction of a volcano, and disappears. It’s as good an opening as any. It introduces us to Gehn and his callous, dispassionate manner. We don’t really learn anything about Anna at first, or even who these people are, but the Prologue is only a few pages long, so it doesn’t matter. The book won’t keep us in suspense for long.

The next chapter opens by talking about what “the boy” is doing. On Page 6 we finally learn his name is Atrus, thus tying together the connection between the book and the games. Atrus has an inquiring and observant mind. Through the course of the first few chapters, we see him continually conducting both experimental and observational science, which is consistent with the Atrus we know from before (sans elevator construction). Anna, his grandmother, becomes one of the most highly-developed characters never to appear in the games, and Atrus’s insatiable curiosity and irrepressible ethics are both qualities she nurtures specifically. Their life together is the primary concern of the first several chapters, which tend to get a bit draggy at times, since no real plot has been introduced yet.

The setting of the first few chapters is The Cleft, a large crevasse at the foot of a barely-active volcano which conceals the only entrance to D’ni. In the novels, it’s located somewhere in the Middle East, but it was retconned to New Mexico in Uru (possibly as a nod to the prominent role of Santa Fe, NM in Cyan’s games?). The Cleft plays a prominent role in both The Book of Atrus and The Book of Ti’ana, which made it one of the most highly-anticipated locations to appear in the games, second only to the D’ni city itself. In this novel, it serves as a symbol for Atrus’s forcibly-stolen past, one that he dwells on constantly. (His backwards-looking fixation on The Cleft is somewhat strange considering that his future lies in constant exploration, but I suppose the extenuating circumstances allow him some homesickness.) To Gehn, the Cleft represents a dead end, a hollow substitute for D’ni’s greatness. In the context of the Myst epic, The Cleft subtly echoes the form and function of The Fissure (particularly in a scene early in the book in which the flooded Cleft reflects the starry sky). Ultimately the Cleft represents a sort of humility, the concept which D’ni was also supposed to represent. The theme of humility will recur throughout the series, as we will see in later essays.

At the end of the first act of the book, Gehn emerges from the volcano and takes a barely-willing Atrus to D’ni with him. The underground city of D’ni, as I have already mentioned, is the most significant location in the series, despite its only marginal appearances in the Atrus-centered games (Myst through Myst IV). This is due to its overwhelming importance to the backstory. The D’ni civilization pioneered the Linking technology we see throughout the games, and the epic and sudden failure of their “best-laid plans” looms threateningly in the background through the rest of the series. And yet neither the D’ni city nor the D’ni people are the primary subjects of this book. While we get a sense of the grandeur of the fallen City, most of the book does not take place there, and the nature of the fall is not discussed.

Much of the tension in the book is between Atrus and Gehn’s differing philosophies, which begin to surface here and will be echoed throughout the series. Gehn sees the D’ni society as a great edifice whose death was undeserved, and believes his duty is to remake it into a sort of underground Mount Olympus where he and his descendants can rule as gods. Atrus sees D’ni’s fall as lamentable but ultimately a thing of the past, and is primarily interested in exploration in a fashion more like tourism than conquest. Gehn also believes that the act of Writing is an act of outright creation, while Atrus subscribes to the canonical opinion that Writing simply creates a link to a preexisting world. (It’s worth noting that Gehn’s beliefs force acceptance of the Omphalos Hypothesis, a Creationist posit which holds that God creates a past history into a newly-created world.) Even their writing styles are at odds with each other, Gehn cutting and pasting from existing works while Atrus starts from scratch and works organically. Their outlooks are entirely at odds with each other, and their cooperation is thus doomed to failure immediately.

Rather than giving a blow-by-blow rehashing of the plot, which would be boring and unnecessary, let’s skip ahead to the appearance of Riven. Gehn’s “Fifth Age” would be the primary setting of the next game, but it’s also foreshadowed extensively here. Still, there’s little in the way of recognizable landmarks between the book and the game. There’s some discussion of Riven’s iconic sheer cliffs, unique water, and of the giant tree (which appears in the game only as a stump), but for the most part there aren’t any specific locations from the book that reappear in the game, which prevents much opportunity for the foreshadowed-visit effect I mentioned in the previous review.

While on Riven, Atrus meets Katran, a young Rivenese woman and Writing prodigy. There is thankfully no overhashed love story between them; they simply appear to enjoy each other’s company and we are left to assume that their physical relationship blossomed later. Katran (or “Catherine,” as Atrus insists on calling her) is an intriguing character, and one to which the series doesn’t really give enough attention. She has a strong personality, and yet is regularly forced into a passive role in the story (more on this in the Riven review). In this book one of her strongest traits is her writing style, which is to disregard all presupposed rules and build Ages which seem to defy the laws of existence. (We won’t get to actually visit one of these Ages until Myst IV, and unfortunately the expectations built up for them will be largely wasted.) Little is learned about Katran here, though, and much of what we’ve heard of her won’t be explored until Myst IV (a game in which she doesn’t even appear in person), and then only in passing. We’ll look at her in greater depth later, but sadly she will always remain the most neglected character in the whole epic.

The conclusion of the book is what ties it most strongly to the games. Katran presents Atrus with the Age of Myst (AKA Myst Island), creating a direct connection between the book and the game for the first time. While Atrus and Gehn fight through a climactic final confrontation, the Age of Riven begins falling into the state of decay which it will display throughout the next game, huge chasms opening as the island begins to break apart. And, most notably, a bit of Katran’s trademark whimsical experimentation creates the Fissure. Atrus traps Gehn on Riven (setting the stage for the next game) as he jumps into the Fissure, tying the book into Myst’s opening video as he loses his Linking Book into the starry expanse. The Book of Atrus concludes by echoing the words from that opening as Atrus pens them for the first time, a neat and clever framing device that completes the circle between the book and the games.

All in all, The Book of Atrus works well. Its ideas build upon those of the games and it helps explain many aspects of the backstory. Much of the content of both this book and the others is never overtly discussed in the games, a fact which means the games are often missing pieces of context for players who’ve not read these “manuals.” Whether this use of print books as dumping grounds for backstory was a good idea I’m not sure–I think to a degree it encouraged laziness in in-game storytelling, but on the other hand, there’s something to be said for allowing the written word, still the most versatile storytelling tool of all, to fill in parts of the story the games could not cover on their own. Taken on its own, this book is no classic of Western literature, but as a part of a larger epic it does an admirable job.

Other thoughts

• Much as I complained about the style of this book, I was struck by how much it influenced some of my own early work, particularly in Remnants, a novel I wrote as a teenager. Much of the descriptive style is the same, particularly the tendency to expound upon about the characters’ surroundings. (One of my friends told me that my novel had too many chapters that began “with birds singing or birds not singing.”)
• The line “Why, it was like staring through a window!” (p. 90) pained me the first time I read it and my annoyance with it has not lessened with time.
• Why does the cat get killed? This part has always bothered me because it doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose to the story. Anna feeds us some line about how Flame’s death somehow moves Atrus “into the adult world [and] away from her,” but through most of the book we see Atrus constantly dwelling on Anna, not moving beyond her. And since the cat is never mentioned again, her death appears to have no lasting effect on Atrus whatsoever. My suggestion: scratch the cat (pun intended).
• Gehn claims that it’s not possible to Link to the surface, ignoring not only the obvious fact that an intermediate Age could be used but also the fact that such an Age already exists. (Nexus, seen in Uru.) We can explain this contradiction, of course, by the fact that Gehn would make up any excuse to avoid going topside.

Next time: Riven: The Sequel to Myst.

As Myst approaches its twentieth anniversary, it’s a good time to take a look back and try to understand what it all meant. Writing now, seven years after the final installment was published, much of the fan base has gone silent, Cyan Worlds (the creators) have turned to simple iPhone games, and the series itself has become little more than a tiny blip in the history of video games. Its initial meteoric arrival is well-known, selling 6 million copies and contributing to the rise of the CD-ROM drive. Its safe, no-dying approach appealed to small-time gamers and its uniqueness to the more die-hard breed. Myst was an anomaly in the video-game scene of 1993, and its influence was felt across the field. Still, many of those 6 million players never actually finished the game, and as we have observed, the series has languished into relative oblivion today. As a longtime fan, I naturally think this fate was undeserved, but as a critic I can’t help but see some of the factors which brought it about. Over the next few months we’ll be taking a trip through the series, beginning with the first game and ending with the last (with three stopovers to look at the novels). Now, if you’d care to join me, I have just stumbled across a most intriguing book…

When Myst opens, the program does not prompt the player to begin or load a game, it simply assumes you want to start from the beginning. The publisher’s and developer’s logos are shown, followed by the intro movie, which includes opening credits. Likewise, when the game is quit, the credits roll. I will call this “movie envy,” a trope which the series unfortunately burdened itself with from the beginning. I suspect it was an attempt to dignify a medium which (especially back in the early 90s) was often looked down upon. Nonetheless it’s an unfortunate framing device, as it builds up expectations which it is not necessarily capable of fulfilling, and by trying to distance itself from its medium it only reinforces preconceptions.

Still, it’s a good opening: We learn from the voiceover that the Myst Book was meant to be destroyed, and its creator (Atrus) is concerned about who will find it. The player’s interest in the book is piqued, especially as she realizes, immediately following the intro, that she is the person who finds the book. Myst was originally billed as being a game in which the protagonist was you, and that conceit is played to full effect here. (Later the “you” was retconned to be a character called “The Stranger” due to an effect which might be called “canon fatigue.” More on that later.) The significance of the Fissure won’t be explained until later installments; for now it’s just an interesting bit of backstory that suggests the longer narrative which took place before the beginning of the game.

Once the intro ends, the player can pick up the Myst Book and “link” for the first time, arriving on Myst Island. The island serves as a hub for your explorations, containing the links to all the other Ages (places) in the game and the information needed to find them. Naturally Myst Island has become the most iconic location of the series and is one of the few to be revisited in later installments (namely Uru: The Path of the Shell and Myst V). This is somewhat unfortunate, because the island seems more dated than anything else in this first installment. Myst Island is a contrived environment more than a working one; it feels more like a mini-golf course than an actual place where people have lived. Implausibility problems are recurrent throughout the series, but they’re most prevalent here: a tiny island that lacks any of the necessities of life but does have a planetarium, giant gears, and a rocketship (among other things).

Still, Myst Island is not without story, and as a game device it does its job. We learn crucial parts of the backstory: Atrus wrote books that “linked” to incredible worlds, but now most of those books have been destroyed, and he suspects his sons. In the library we find Atrus’s journals, which his exploits in the worlds he has linked to, and we also meet the aforementioned sons, Sirrus and Achenar. They’re locked up inside “Trap Books” and plead with the player to retrieve the red and blue pages needed to release them. (The first pages are placed in plain sight, allowing the player to become familiar this mechanic before the actual exploration begins.) Seeing the brothers’ live-action faces is somewhat startling, the player having become used to vast, unoccupied stretches of relatively primitive CGI. It’s a good moment for the game, reinforcing the realistic effect the creators are striving for.

The CGI, incidentally, has held up surprisingly well, considering that when this game was released few people had even heard of Pixar. Aside from a few extremely low-resolution textures, the graphics are not really at a cringe-worthy level even today. Many of the copycat projects that took after it did far worse. The limitations can be seen in places (the tiny, minimal movie clips, the weird water, the rarity of nonessential shots), but given the constraints of the technology, the team did an incredible job. Granted, the game never looks quite “real” per se, but most of it does not look wholly artificial.

While the CGI generally preserves suspension of disbelief, the design manages to frequently undo it. Many puzzles feel distinctly contrived, serving no in-game purpose other than to slow down the player. Likewise, Atrus eventually begins to come across as an awfully compulsive builder, remaking every landscape with extensive tunnels, large buildings, and complex machinery, most of it serviced by elevators. (This is not even to mention the potentially hundreds of miles of underground Mazerunner track, which lead absolutely nowhere.) Still, as a first attempt we can give the game a pass. The next installment, Riven, would set a new precedent for logical environments, one that future games would strive for and often fall short of.

Back on the story side, the player must read through Atrus’s journals before she can progress to the game’s other Ages. These travelogues serve an ingenious function, allowing the creators to smoothly integrate extensive backstory and infuse meaning into locations which the player will see later. Actually visiting an Age after reading about it has an incredibly powerful effect, a strong sensation of recognition: I just read about this, and now I’m actually seeing it! Later on in the series, Uru took advantage of this same effect when it allowed players into D’ni, the massive underground civilization previously known only from the novels. (Aside from a tiny glimpse of it at the end of Myst.)

Compared to the later games, Myst’s Ages seem strangely tiny. Mechanical especially has a claustrophobic feel, the entire extent of the Age being a fortress with only two sizable rooms. The largest Age is probably Channelwood, with its three levels of walkways, but even it is dwarfed by Riven and (much later) Uru’s Teledahn. This is primarily due to technical restraints, I suspect. Still, the Ages are where the bulk of Myst takes place, and they do their job, providing varied environments to explore, and building the case against Sirrus and Achenar.

Sirrus and Achenar’s true personas, and how they are slowly revealed, is one of the high points of Myst’s storytelling. From the outset we can see that they’re trying to hide something (both of them insist that the player not help the other). We don’t really get a taste of their personalities until we begin exploring the Ages, at which point we learn about them by looking at the things they’ve left behind. The Ages are no longer the utopiastic places described in Atrus’s journals; instead, all their inhabitants are gone and caches of the brothers’ things (neatly identified by their respective red or blue pages) turn up in dark corners. These caches represent a perfect example of defining a character by his possessions. Sirrus’s things invariably include gold, jewels, and finery, while Achenar’s tend to be grotesque trophies, poisons, and weapons. By showing us (not telling us!) what the brothers have been up to, the game slowly builds a strong case against them, leading us to the final big choice of the game.

The “final big choice” was another of the game’s biggest breakthroughs, and it was copied extensively by the later installments. Both the brothers beg to be released and insist that they alone are innocent, and at first the dilemma appears to be who to trust, Sirrus or Achenar. But as it becomes clear that both are reprehensible and guilty, the dilemma changes. When it comes time to make the final big choice, the player can either release one of the brothers, or open a third book which, according to the brothers, is a trap. Now, this isn’t a perfect dilemma, really: after all the brothers’ lies I doubt many people believed the claim that the third book was dangerous, but the fact is that the player must independently decide that the third option (regardless of what it is) is probably preferable to freeing either of the brothers.

Which brings us to the ending of the game. Or, I should say, the non-ending. We choose the green book and visit Atrus in D’ni, and he goes to Myst and destroys the Red and Blue Books. Then he comes back, politely thanks the player for helping, and gets back to work. The player can choose to either wander around the room  (without music or sound effects, even) or go back to Myst Island and revisit places she’s already been. It’s an anticlimax of the worst kind, a “good” ending with less closure than the bad endings. It was corrected a little bit with the remake, realMyst, which added a small bonus Age made accessible after the ending, but did little to change the fact that the ending wasn’t an ending at all. Now, because I am meddlesome, here’s my own suggestion for a better ending: When Atrus returns to D’ni, he should tell the player that there’s one more undestroyed Book and he’s left it out for her to see when she gets back. Upon returning to Myst and linking with the new book, the credits would roll, leaving the player with an unseen adventure for her imagination. Sure, it’s not a perfect ending either by any means, but at least it brings some sort of closure to the story.

So, in the end, is Myst a success or a failure? Like many things, it has elements of both. It has a strong story, atmosphere, and (for the time) sophisticated graphics. On the other hand, it has some downright nonsensical design elements, technologically-imposed issues, and numerous poorly-conceived puzzles that drove many people to simply give up on the whole thing. Still, looking beyond the mistakes, it’s easy to see Myst as a necessary, and largely successful, first step. The format had not been perfected, not quite yet, but the creators managed to build an enjoyable game anyway. The series, as it evolved, built on the successes and failures of this game. Technological improvements allowed for improved visuals and movement, and a new precedent for logical world-building eliminated many problems with irrational puzzles and landscapes. Unfortunately, some of its problems were transmitted to its descendants like bad genes. As the first of the series, Myst set the precedent for all the others to follow. How they chose to do so varied, as we will see.

Other notes:

• It’s sort of refreshing to be reminded how the series felt before becoming burdened down with word-on-high canon decisions. Numerous aspects of the game were later written out as “artistic license,” most notably Trap Books, rendering much of the first game “noncanonical.” The very premise of Myst IV practically wipes out the existence of the events of Myst by retconning out the Trap Book concept.
• Ironically for a game about exploration, Myst has a deeply entrenched message of anti-colonialism. Atrus constantly preaches a distanced, objective philosophy toward the cultures of the Ages, and his sons’ actions are largely imperialistic in nature. There seems to be a sort of guilt inherent in the concept of exploration now, one that necessitates that stories of exploration must also contain an anti-colonialist moral. This theme will recur throughout the games, reaching new heights in Uru, which depicts exploration as being downright evil.
• We don’t learn much about Catherine/Katran in this installment. I can’t help but wonder how much thought the developers had given her at this point.
• What exactly is the point of Selenitic? It’s unlike the other Ages in that it has pretty much nothing of interest to Sirrus and Achenar, and since nothing of theirs even appears in the Age, it’s almost as if they never even visited it. Did it escape their wrath because they thought it was too boring to bother with? Even its associated journal is largely made up of blank pages.
• The only clue about how to solve the Mazerunner is located in a different part of the game, one which is neither accessible from the Mazerunner nor necessarily visited first. That is classic bad puzzle design.
• The piano puzzle inside the rocketship is another well-known bad puzzle, but strangely I never had any problems with it. My guess is that it’s primarily people who’ve never played a musical instrument who have trouble with it. Apparently Cyan’s game testers had musical backgrounds.

Next time: Myst: The Book of Atrus

Screenshots property of Cyan Worlds.

FICTION
Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer.
Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman.
Banks, Russel. Lost Memory of Skin.
Carver, Raymond. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (part)
Davidson, Lionel. Under Plum Lake.
Coupland, Douglas. Player One.
Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Evans, Nicholas. The Brave.
Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Handler, Daniel. Adverbs. (part)
Jin, Ha. Waiting.
Juster, Norton. The Phantom Tollbooth.
Knowles, John. A Separate Peace.
Mamet, David. Oleanna.
Mamet, David. The Old Religion.
Murakami, Haruki. Kafka on the Shore.
Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2
Russo, Richard. Empire Falls.
Russo, Richard. That Old Cape Magic.
Scott, Joanna. Make Believe.
Shakespeare, William “The Bard.” King Lear.
Snicket, Lemony. The Bad Beginning.
Wolff, Tobias. Our Story Begins. (part)
Yu, Charles. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

Favorite fiction book this year: Empire Falls. This book will keep influencing my work for a long time, I think. Strong sense of place and good character interaction.

Least favorite fiction book this year: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I can’t begin listing the myriad problems with this book. I still can’t believe I read the whole thing. Read Victor Lodato’s Mathilda Savitch instead.

NON-FICTION
Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds. (part)
Brunetti, Ivan. Cartooning.
Berlioz, Hector. Evenings with the Orchestra. (part)
Decker, Kevin S. et al. Star Trek and Philosophy. (part)
Ehrman, Bart. Misquoting Jesus.
Mauro, James. Twilight at the World of Tomorrow.
Ross, Alex. Listen to This. (part)
Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics.
Steinberg, Avi. Running the Books.

Favorite non-fiction this year: Twilight at the World of Tomorrow is full of entertaining characters and enthusiasm drawn from the historic 1939 World’s Fair. I really enjoyed it.

Least favorite non-fiction this year: Hector Berlioz’s diatribes against Chinese music in Evenings with the Orchestra. Debussy, a few years later, would find much inspiration in the same stuff Berlioz dismissed out-of-hand. (The book isn’t bad overall though.)

COMICS
Brunetti, Ivan (ed.). Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories v. 2.
Clowes, Daniel. Ice Haven.
Clowes, Daniel. Wilson.
Cotter, Joshua W. Skyscrapers of the Midwest.
Eisner, Will. The Contract With God Trilogy.
Herge. Tintin and the Picaros. (read before)
Herge. Tintin: Castafiore Emerald, The. (read before)
Herge. Tintin: Flight 714. (read before)
Herge. Tintin in Tibet. (read before)
Hines, Adam. Duncan the Wonder Dog v. 1.
Karasik, Paul et al. City of Glass.
Mazzuchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. (read before)
Novgorodoff, Danica. Slow Storm.
Ottaviani, Jim et al. Feynman.
Powell, Nate. Any Empire.
Powell, Nate. Swallow Me Whole.
Shaw, Dash. Bottomless Belly Button.
Sikoryak, R. Masterpiece Comics.
Tardi, Jacques. Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec v. 1.
Thompson, Craig. Blankets.
Thompson, Craig. Habibi.
Thompson, Richard. Cul de Sac Treasury.
Ward, Lynd. Six Novels in Woodcuts v. 1
Ware, Chris. Acme Novelty Library #20 (”Lint”).

Favorite comics this year: Swallow Me Whole. Beautiful art and a haunting story of two children with schizophrenia.

Least favorite comics this year: Slow Storm. Not bad exactly, but the art’s a little muddy and the story kind of disjointed. It’s a debut, though, and Ms. Novgorodoff certainly has potential. Also frustrating: Craig Thompson’s ill-advised epic Habibi.