riven is definitely an improvement over myst in pretty much every way. the navigation is way smoother just by nature of better scene transitions and the more readable pointer, though i do think it would be still improved with actual movement since it can still be pretty easy to get directionally misguided or just miss important things outright while trying to regain bearings. the world itself felt significantly more intricate and detailed which i really enjoyed, and the visual storytelling is a vast improvement (although there is still plenty of lore dumping); i liked occasionally coming across scenes during exploration even if they had no bearing on the puzzles at all; the voiced scenes really need subtitles though because especially with the existence of the other language it can sometimes be hard to tell if the voices are supposed to be english or not. the atmosphere and MUSIC are also super, super good, even with the limitations of the time. as for the puzzles themselves, i thought they were much better crafted for the most part, which is somewhat helped by the larger world. there were only a couple things i took issue with in that regard (which i suspect are not uncommon): for one, i think the game could have been significantly clearer in regard to the whole animal puzzle; i enjoyed finding the animal shapes once i knew what to look for, but the link between "eyes" and "animal shapes" is kind of a big leap to make without any guidance, and even then it's a bit annoying that even that is inconsistent, with two of them not even fitting the pattern. the other thing i found a bit annoying was the dome puzzle requiring actual guesswork wrt the prison island, which seemed pretty out of place in juxtaposition with the rest of the game. on the other hand though, i really enjoyed figuring out the number system, which was actually probably my biggest "lightbulb moment" in either game haha. and to be clear - i loved that the animal and dome puzzles made use of the entire world in really cool ways - i just think the final execution could have been better.
as a whole - i definitely had fun with this and it definitely deserves "classic" status; like myst, i think i'll probably appreciate it more retrospectively, watching someone else play it and having the full context, and just generally being able to talk about it, but on its own, a very solid 8/10!