So Iāve been watching some YouTube videos of a guy doing a blind playthrough of Riven, and Iām starting to understand why some people claim that the game is extremely hard.Ā It was initially a huge surprise to me to go online and find out that everyone thought that this game was just ridiculously hard.Ā Iāve always wondered if I didnāt find it hard because I was just super amazingly smart or something, and I was always afraid to say I didnāt find it hard because I worried that people would think I was bragging.Ā But now I think the mystery is finally coming clear to me.
So, I am five hours and 20 minutes into the Letās Play and so far, the puzzles he has solved:
The rotating room.Ā At the beginning of the game, he saw that it rotated, and realized that the cave entrance was one rotation away from the main entrance and was like, āok, I see how this works but I donāt want to solve it right nowā and then went off and did some other stuff.Ā Later, he came back and solved it very quickly, correctly interpreting what all of the various levers did.Ā A+
The boiler.Ā He did basically what I did and accidentally got it into a state where he could enter the boiler before really understanding what all the controls did, but later came back and systematically figured out what they all did and what the inside of the boiler looked like in all its various states.Ā A+
Closing the doors on Boiler Island.Ā It took a few trips back and forth through that area, messing around with the Ytram trap and wondering about the significance of the fan before he thought to try closing the doors.Ā But honestly, I think he did it in a pretty good amount of time.Ā A+
So, heās had what I consider to be no trouble at all with the actual puzzles, so far, and the next video is titled āIMMENSE PROGRESSā so Iām guessing this success rate only improves from here.Ā So why does he talk constantly about how the game is hard?Ā These are the reasons I can pinpoint:
He often misses details of locations.Ā For example, he seemingly didnāt see the lever on the telescope for a very long time, he didnāt see the path to the fourth eye, he walked right past the lever on the doorway into the golden dome several times.Ā This hasnāt actually hindered his progress at all - none of those things are things that you need to even know about in order to advance the game in these early stages.Ā But itās clear to me that coming back to a location that heās been to many times and discovering something that heās completely missing up until now makes him think that the game is hard.Ā For whatever reason, I had no trouble spotting these things and discovered them on my first pass through those locations, so I think I saw my discovery of them in a completely different light.Ā For example, I discovered you could go under the locked gate at the beginning of the game by stooping down to look at the moiety dagger on the ground, like I think everyone does, and so did he.Ā I remember thinking, aha, what a great way to provide a clue that you can go under the gate!Ā Whereas, he, after discovering, and then after haphazardly discovering new things in old locations at seemingly random times, complains aloud that āeverything I discover is by accident, like for example, when I discovered you could go under the gateā¦ā
He doesnāt experiment enough.Ā His instinct when he discovers a new lever, and flipping it around doesnāt seem to cause anything really interesting to happen is, oh, I should put this back in its original position and come back to it when I know what it does.Ā But the correct response is to try flipping it to a different position, and then go wander around and see what has changed.Ā There is no manual you can find the game that tells you what all the levers do.Ā This has actively prevented him from figuring out how to access the other submarine stops. I think this is maybe just unfamiliarity with the genre?
He seemed to get stuck on a few places where he seemed to be expecting that there was something more to see there - so far this has been mainly with that house in the village where if you knock enough times a person opens the window briefly, and with the sunners.Ā The fact that these are both video segments makes me wonder if more modern games have made people expect more things from video segments like this?Ā He watched the sunners make their noise over and over again without realizing that the noise was the only thing there was to learn there.Ā And he got audibly more frustrated when these two areas failed to provide anything further.Ā Something that I admittedly donāt understand at all was that in between listening to the sunners, he discovered the fourth eye, and then immediately went back down to listen to the sunners again, but never realized that they were making the same sound that the eye made.Ā Maybe itās because he hasnāt seemingly been trying to describe the sounds made by the eyes, although he has realized that the second eye makes the same sound as the beetle.Ā For the other eyes, though, heās just been saying āā¦I donāt really know how to describe that soundā.Ā I can imagine that if you donāt have a great memory for sounds it would definitely make the eye less obvious.
So, it seems like ultimately the difference between āthis game was really hardā and āthis game was actually pretty easyā is not that great, and it seems to depend mostly on your familiarity with the genre?Ā Anyway, I am interested in watching the rest of the videos to see how he does later.
