Like when I played Myst, I felt completely isolated in this worlds. Empty, beautifully rendered places with intricate architecture and mechanisms. They're alienating.

This time, however, they're also corrupt. Even if one of the big puzzles conveys the importance of symbols and their meaning, by the middle of the game, when you learn the truth about Riven, wonder and discovery were lost for me.

What remains in this world is the colonized hellscape of a white supremacist, with almost no trace of the native people. Their land completely erased by techno-shortcut infestation. You learn about their culture through the extensive and condescending diaries of the only two people you meet. It ends on a new-age sequence talking about the full-circle of life and creation, which didn't really do much.

As a personal complain, reading those diaries was pretty fucking difficult when english is not your first language and everyone has the writing of a doctor.