"There's also a chance, if all goes well, that I might be able to get you back to the place that you came from."
So this was supposed to be a quick project but ended up absorbing most of the weekend.
Riven is, as far as I'm concerned, the gold standard for this specific style of adventure game. Cyan were on top of their game. There's a reason the genre is often referred to as Myst-likes. For all the praise that Myst garnered, however, Riven is better in every conceivable way. It's an absolute masterpiece of atmosphere, art design, sound design, and natural, integrated, coherent puzzles that aren't just "an arbitrary Rubik's cube that you come across" as Robyn Miller rightfully described those found in so many games of this ilk - they're all part of a larger world, and many of them are downright utilitarian in nature; it just takes some time to understand their workings and purpose.
I could continue to rant, at length, about how great Riven is and why it's the best the genre has seen, to this day, but I'll save that for another time. Suffice it to say, I love this game and I wanted to take a crack at making it even better.
I haven't really talked about this before, but I generally end up tweaking the shaders for these packages to some degree to better suit the needs of the game in question. That said, I ended up having to rework them significantly for Riven and I'm happy to say I think they turned out very well.
Limited technology being what it was, compression and dithering were essential in order to fit everything on CDs - five in the case of Riven. The result of this is that a lot of the game takes a bit of a beating once viewed on high definition displays. The otherwise fantastic art design suffers because of it... but with the help of shaders we can give it a facelift! Now we can turn this into this. You can find the full gallery here.
I added in quite a few extras as well. Included are:
-The soundtrack -Making of and behind the scenes videos -From Myst to Riven: The Creations & Inspirations (art/documentary book) -Strategy Guide (Brady Games) -Strategy Guide (Prima)
It includes controller support as usual and I added in a right-click to skip animations function. Read the included readme for more info.
As with the last one, this patcher does not include the game. You must have the game downloaded first. It will work with either the GOG Galaxy version or the offline backup version. I believe it should work with the Steam version as well (it's supposed to be the same version), that's untested though. If anyone would like to test and let me know, that'd be much appreciated.
The only requirement, like the last time, is that the folder be dropped parallel to the installed one, and the installed one needs to be named "Riven - The Sequel to Myst". So, as an example: C:\Games\Riven - The Sequel to Myst C:\Games\Riven - The Sequel to Myst (Definitive Edition) Then just go into Riven - The Sequel to Myst (Definitive Edition) and start PATCH.bat and you'll be all set!
Be aware that this patch is currently English only - it's actually about half the size of the GOG install once it's done because it doesn't contain all the additional language audio/data. It should be possible to allow specific language data to be pulled for the patch but that's not implemented yet, it will only use the English data at the moment.
Anyway, that's it for now. I should have the updated version of Zomb's Obscura Vol. 1 out tomorrow and then I'm back at it for new releases.
Have fun!