puzzle games

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The new Riven remake is even better than Myst

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A bridge to a mysterious island

Enlarge / The same gorgeous vistas return in the Riven remake.

Samuel Axon

A remake of Riven: The Sequel to Myst launched this week, made by the original game’s developers. It strikes a fascinating balance between re-creation and reinvention, and based on a couple of hours of playing it, it’s a resounding success.

Myst was the classic most people remembered fondly from the early CD-ROM era, but for me, its sequel, Riven, was the highlight. After that, the sequels declined in quality. The sophomore effort was the apex.

It was certainly more ambitious than Myst. Instead of a handful of tightly packed theme park worlds, it offered a singular, cohesive one that felt lived in and steeped in history in a way that Myst couldn’t quite match.

A worthy presentation

That was thanks to outstanding art direction but also to its iconic musical score.

For the most part, the remake nails both of those things. While the original game resembled the first Myst in that you had to click to scroll between static images to explore the game’s world, the new one follows the 2020 Myst remake (and 2000’s oft-forgotten realMyst) in giving the player full movement, akin to contemporary first-person puzzle games like Portal, The Witness, or The Talos Principle. Since it’s easy to re-create a lot of the original camera angles this way, it might have been cool if there had been an option to control the game as you did originally, but I can see why that wasn’t a priority.

The environments are just as atmospheric and detailed as they used to be.

Enlarge / The environments are just as atmospheric and detailed as they used to be.

Samuel Axon

It just so happens that today’s graphics hardware does an outstanding job of replicating previously static visuals in full 3D. (There’s even VR support, though I haven’t tried it yet.) And the music is just as good as it used to be.

There are only two downsides on the presentation front. First, I’ve heard that folks running on older machines may struggle to achieve satisfactory fidelity and performance. I played it on both an M1 Max MacBook Pro and a Windows 11 desktop with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. The MacBook Pro ran the game at maxed-out settings at the laptop’s native resolution at around 30 frames per second. The desktop did the same at 4K at 120 fps. But those are both high-end, recent-ish machines, so your mileage may vary.

Second, the full-motion video performances in the original game have been replaced with full 3D, video game-looking characters. It’s a necessary concession, but I feel some of the character was lost. They did a pretty good job matching the motions of the original videos, though.

  • The original’s FMV performances have been replaced by respectable but still video game-ish 3D models.

    Samuel Axon

  • The fictional animals fare a bit better visually.

    Samuel Axon

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Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles

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Can YOU reach the treasure? —

It’s pin-pulling, color-pouring, fake-but-real fun, and you only pay once.

–

Pin-pulling puzzle with a stick figure, boulder, and treasure.

Enlarge / Can you master the ornate physics and inscrutable game theory necessary to overcome this challenge?

D3Publisher

You’ve seen them. If you’ve tried to read almost anything on the Internet, especially on a social media site, you know these mobile game advertisements.

“Many failed before! Think you can do better?” one reads, positioned over an auto-playing video of a simple puzzle played by an unseen, incredibly stupid hand. It pulls the wrong pin, melting the gold and drowning the king. Or it can’t do elementary math, so it sends a “10” fighter to its death against a “13” creature, ignoring the “8” it could have picked to add up to 18. Sometimes, there are colored liquids in tubes to be poured, and they are selected with an almost elegant idiocy.

They’re infuriating, but you know they work, because these ads keep showing up. If you actually downloaded these games, you’d discover they were stuffed with pop-up ads, relentlessly barking micro-transactions, or they’re some unrelated and cynically monetized game entirely. What if you could actually play the original bait games for a reasonable one-time fee, crafted by a developer who was in on the joke?

The stage select music gets to be a bit much, but nobody will sue you if you play with the sound off.

That’s exactly what Those Games are. Their full title is Yeah! You Want “Those Games,” Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let’s See You Clear Them!, originally in all caps. Developer Monkeycraft, makers of the Katamari Damacy Reroll titles, has now made many of the games that don’t seem to exist. They’ve just arrived for the PlayStation, having already provided their public service on Nintendo Switch and Windows on Steam. The package is $10 on all platforms.

Some people will find that price a bargain, given the chance to prove how much better they’d be at these kinds of puzzles than the psychological dark patterns that taunt them. Some people might wait for a sale, given that you are, in fact, getting some very free-to-play-esque puzzles. But having spent more time than I expected tackling them, I can vouch that once you get past the first few patronizing levels and adjust to some slightly muddy controls in a couple of titles, each set of games starts giving you real, thoughtfully constructed challenges.

Three of the games in Those Games were instantly familiar to me, a person who owns a smartphone and reads things on it. Surprisingly, I had never seen the last two in the list here:

  • Pin Pull, removing barriers between you, monsters, traps, and treasure in the right order
  • Number Tower, sending your number-ranked fighter to tackle numbered monsters, potions, power-ups, and rebuffs in the right order
  • Color Lab, combining similar colors from vials in the right order
  • Parking Lot, moving cars facing different directions out of a lot with a circular drive, in the right order
  • Cash Run, clicking on an auto-walking man to have him pile up money to avoid obstacles, finishing with enough to not be “poor” and disappoint his spouse

  • I got a few levels past this Pin Pull stage, but not through all 50. Troll clubs goblin, goblins run toward stick guy, so when do you release rock?

    DCPublisher

  • As with most of the games, the inherent “how hard could it be?” starts coming back on you as the complications multiply.

    DCPublisher

  • You can’t pour a full, single-color vial, and that makes the later levels of Color Lab an actual challenge.

    DCPublisher

  • Parking Lot is fun, but only if you stop caring about timing and star ratings, given the quirky controls.

    DCPublisher

  • Cash Run is perhaps the only game in the set you could suggest has a deeper meaning, vis-a-vis capitalism. It’s also harder to grasp than the others.

    DCPublisher

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One of VR’s Smartest Room-scale Games Finally Comes to Quest 2

Eye of the Temple, eye of the temple quest, eye of the temple quest 2, News, puzzle games, room scale vr games, Rune Skovbo Johansen, VR Game, vr puzzles / /

Room-scale puzzle Eye of the Temple (2021) is available on Quest 2 starting today, bringing one of VR’s most clever room-scale experiences to a platform where it probably makes the most sense.

Update (April 27th, 2023): Eye of the Temple is now live on the Quest Store for Quest 2, bringing its innovative room-scale puzzling to the standalone headset.

Ported to Quest with the help of Salmi Games, Eye of the Temple lets you explore a vast and treacherous temple and uncover the ancient legend of the Eye. Just make sure to have plenty of space in your room for plenty of walking, whipping, and hopefully no tripping.

Check out the new launch trailer, linked below:

Original Article (April 13th, 2023): Released on SteamVR headsets in 2021 by indie developer Rune Skovbo Johansen, Eye of the Temple is a unique puzzle that we haven’t seen before or since.

The game’s innovative locomotion style lets you explore a massive temple complex with your own two feet, ushering you to jump onto moving platforms of all shapes and sizes, which importantly takes place within a 2×2m physical space.

What results is a mechanically pleasing and immersive experience that teleportation or even joystick-controller smooth locomotion simply can’t provide. We liked it so much at the time, we even gave it Road to VR’s 2021 Excellence in Locomotion award.

Skovbo Johansen says the secret to the unique locomotion style is keeping the player in the center of the play area, which he says are “all about how the platforms are positioned relative to each other.”

Take a look at how it works in the explainer video below:

While most PC VR tethers provide enough slack to get around the required 2×2m play area, the amount of turning and jumping you’ll do in the physical space really pushes the user’s ability to ‘tune out’ the cable to the limit, as you have to unwind yourself and hop over the tether constantly—something you might not notice as much in less physical games.

There’s no word on when we can expect Eye of the Temple to release on Quest 2, which critically removes any cable faffing woes you may have.

In the meanwhile, catch the trailer below, and follow along with Skovbo Johansen on Twitter where he regularly posts updates on the game’s development.

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