I actually didn't play Riven until about 5 years ago, when it came out on iOS (I played Myst on CD as a kid). Learning the game's number system was a fascinating exercise that I don't think I've ever had in any other game.
Basically, in your explorations you eventually happen upon a small empty one-room building, which (if you look at the arrangement of desks) you can deduce is some sort of schoolhouse. In that room you'll find a mechanical wooden-and-string toy on a table. If you interact with it, the symbol on the base changes, and the toy performs some sort of action (I think dropping a weight) some number of times. From that you can deduce that the symbols are numbers, and the toy is for teaching what number each of the symbols represents.
If you're playing correctly, you've got some scratch paper handy (I used a drawing app) and you can write down each symbol and what number it corresponds to. And you'd better do this, because you're going to see a lot of important numbers in the game, and this is the only way they are written.
Towards the end of the game, you find a journal from one of the characters, which is written in English. However, when referring to the Age (the game's term for different worlds) that they've gone to, they use these numerals. If you've done your homework, you'll know that they've named their new world "The 233rd Age".
The numeral system is really interesting in its own regard, too. It's written as base-25, but each digit is composed of two base-5 subdigits superimposed on each other at right angles in a square frame. (The subdigits are all designed in a way that makes this unambiguous.) For example, 0 is an empty square and 1 is a vertical line, so 5 is written as a horizontal line, and 6 is a cross.
The game uses 5 as an "arc number" -- Riven is the "fifth age", the main game area consists of five islands, many objects and locations in the game are five-sided, and the game was originally distributed on five CDs -- so it's only natural for the number system to operate on base-5 as well. :)
There's also an alphabetical writing system present in game, but it's used with a constructed in-game language (not just a cipher for English text), so players aren't expected to understand it.
Also the font for the books in Riven were terrible. I could read all the Myst books. They were relatively short and it was a neat device to learn the story. In Riven, they were painful to read and there were so many books everywhere.
I even bought a copy of Exile used at a bookstore for like $5, but never played more than 10 min of it. I would have liked to have finished the series, but Riven kinda was an example of why the entire 90s/early-2000s adventure game genre (Sierra, LucasArts, etc.) failed. LucasArts probably had the only games that were not over challenging and that could be solved with just time and persistence. Everyone else relied on sales of hint books (and no one wants to use a hint book; you want to figure it out for yourself).
The new era of adventure games fixed a lot of this. Telltale and Quantic Dream used their adventure games more to push story (not a lot of "puzzles" in the traditional sense), but there are others with a decent mix of story and puzzles.
A great example of the two game building attitudes in a single game is Broken Age. The first half: amazing. The puzzles were fun but not over challenging, the story drew you in, the graphics were beautiful and the characters were relatable. Part two: stupid-insane-difficult-terrible puzzles, story went to crap, didn't care what happened.
This is also part of why the game is so difficult. It does expect the player go through a certain sequence of events to advance the plot. But all of this is in a very open world that presents you with a lot of puzzle pieces that you can't do anything with initially. This breadth of possible options makes it harder to identify those pieces that the game wants you to connect in the puzzles. I've read a long while ago that the Millers have underestimated how much this drives difficulty. They said that later Myst series titles are designed to be more sequential experiences with less interconnected pieces as a result.
Anyway, I really view those games as the last of the nearly impossible games that were everywhere in the 1980s. And not just adventure games, a lot of arcade games were the same way, I played conan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Hall_of_Volta for probably 4 months straight before I beat its 7 (?) lousy screens. 99% of the difficulty was basically being able to play it perfectly for the ~15 mins it takes to win. If you added a save game feature it would have probably only taken a couple hours.
If you watch the playthroughs on youtube, the difficulty is completely not evident. Another one like that was Dragons Liar.
On the plus side, the incredible rush one got when figuring out a puzzle after spending days on it is maybe part of the reason a lot of modern games simply aren't fun.
What's really interesting to me is how the numbers are encoded when they get larger than 25. The game requires you to understand the basic pattern of system in order to generalize from numbers in the schoolhouse (1-10) to the numbers required to complete the game (1-25 at most). But even understanding this, there is something off about how this Age number is written: just reading the numerals, it appears to be written as "98rd". But what the game doesn't explicitly tell you is that the number system is actually in base 25! So, "98rd" is actually "9*25 + 8"rd, or "233rd", making the grammar work out.
I wonder if they ever playtested a base 25 puzzle and judged it too difficult.
Deciphering it made for a reasonably fun exercise, and I wish more games had puzzles like that.
Harder are the moments when you actually care if one time has longer seconds than another due to leap seconds or smearing over the day to spread out a leap second.
It's really just easiest if you take nothing for granted, and even assume that clock-cycles aren't of a fixed duration but of a given quanta of work.
Thanks to spread-spectrum clocking, this really ought to be the default assumption for most computers. It's a small variance, but it's there.
I have two older brothers so growing up I was exposed to a ton of stuff way outside my age range (but I credit a lot of my success to this). I played countless hours of Riven when I was 9 or 10. I really didn't get far at all. But I am still wildly proud of figuring out their numerical system using the fish game. Watching your clock flooded back deep memories about that.
I continue to crave games that make me feel that way. Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds) is the closest since.
Dozens more.
Wow. That's motivating!
> First up, a little primer – the digits used in the Myst games, aka D’ni digits, are a base-25 numbering system. This means they count up using symbols like [1], [2], [3], [4] … [22], [23], [24], [1][0]. That is, what they call “10”, we call “25”
Does anyone know where to get a 3 inch round led/lcd display (ideally that can be attached to a Raspberry Pi)? I've looked online and they are either crazy expensive, a round display on a square back, or I have to buy 1000 of them.
I assume I'm just not googling right.
