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Already in the early 1990s, the creators of Mist they had a problem with their testers. Players would wander around the initial island, click on the rocket ship, turn the levers on the platforms up and down, and watch as none of it did anything. The amount of puzzles was huge, the solutions inaccessible. They would get bored, then frustrated, and then too many of them would give up.

The solution was to add a hologram near the starting point of the game that contained a recorded message from Mistleading figure, Atrus. And if the players missed that room, there was a piece of paper—a piece of paper, loose on the ground – with a note on it that told the players – with, as, words! — to go check this room.

This will be fixed today by making the message room more obvious. Or starting with the player facing the door or by placing the room in a privileged position. In the genre of puzzle games where you explore a series of quirky little rooms, environmental storytelling is king. Except the phrase “environmental storytelling” wouldn’t be coined until years after the release of Mist and its shattering sequel, Riven.

Unpacking the legacies of these two games would require another article in its own right, but suffice it to say that the genre that developer Cyan Worlds put on the map has evolved considerably in the 30 years since then Mist and Riven were released for the first time. That’s why it’s so compelling to play this week’s 3D remake of Rivenin which Rand Miller and the rest of the folks at Cyan return to a masterpiece with three decades of environmental puzzle games behind them.

Riven (2024) is a fascinating conservation work. The game’s earliest life began as the Starry Expanse Project, a fan effort to faithfully convert the three hours of video and nearly 5,000 images that made up the original Riven in a walkable 3D environment. The end result, after Cyan officially absorbed the project’s assets and even hired some of its contributors, is – in a word – wonderful.

Rivenis, after all, a game of stone, metal, and wood, textures that Unreal Engine can simulate with your eyes closed, and the remake has views that, as long as you don’t move your view, you can almost make sure they are pictures. The other good news for the pleasure centers of fans’ brains is that the original game’s sound design is intact. The meaty thunk-griiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind-LATCH of Temple Island’s revolving room, the shrill screech of metal as a maglev car turns, the bone-vibrating crash of a tumbling fire marble—they’re all exactly as you remember them.

Also familiar: Loading screens take forever. But for a game that originally prompted you to insert one of five different CD-ROMs every time you moved from one island to another – a core, frequent and intended part of the game – sitting through a slightly disguised loading screen, however long as it is, it is tangible progress.

Other parts will no be familiar.

Some decisions that remained the same from game to game in the original are now randomized for each save, so cheeky players can’t just look up the answers. By necessity, the full-motion video actors have been replaced with animated figures in sync with both the original and re-recorded dialogue. Those 30-year-old records just don’t make it to modern screens.

Image: Cyan Worlds

Image: Cyan Worlds

The transition from static images without the need for a Euclidean space sequence to a full 3D environment has myriad effects. Some rooms are not where they used to be; some modes of travel just didn’t work in 3D space. But some tweaks seem completely thought out by the developers – and well chosen.

The Riven a remake gently closes off areas of the game that were initially fully accessible to a new player, but unsolvable until much later in their playthrough, so as to prevent exactly the kind of overwrought frustration that early Mist experienced playtesters. Two of the game’s most engaging puzzles have also been completely reworked in ways that simply weren’t technologically possible in 1997.

These are not small changes, and I expect some of them to change the nostalgia of longtime fans. But on the other hand, RivenThe most demanding, annoying, time-consuming stumbling block is here transformed into something visually stunning and attractive to manipulate.

If you are a Riven fan, you just have to play this version. If you’ve never played Riven, there is no better option. Escape to another world is not just the outer promise of the Myst games, but the actual premise and RivenThe update brings these two things closer than ever.

Riven was released on June 25 on Meta Quest VR and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-download code provided by Cyan Worlds, Inc. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. They do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.