To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Riven, the sequel to the beloved puzzle game Myst, Cyan Worlds has announced that the title will be getting a full remake. It’s not clear which platforms the games will be released on, and no release date has been specified. However, the team at Cyan has released a brief FAQ and open letter to discuss the game and the impact it’s had on players for the last two decades.
According to Cyan, the game will be a modern remake rather than a remaster. While the original game was a point-and-click adventure game, this new imagining will be “fully traversable in 3D space,” with more information said to be coming at a later date. When asked why this took so long, the team made it clear that this remake isn’t being taken lightly.
“Riven is one of the most highly regarded games in Cyan’s history,” the FAQ reads. “We didn’t want to approach it lightly or frivolously. Cyan is a small indie studio. We wanted to make sure we could take on such a difficult, costly and complicated endeavor—and do it well.”
Check out the teaser trailer for the Riven remake below.
Myst was first released in 1993 for the Macintosh. The point-and-click game managed to become a surprise hit, and to this day, it is regarded as one of the best video games ever made, inspiring many games and genres to come after. In it, players travel to a magical world through a strange book where they must solve puzzles to travel to four other worlds to find out more about the title’s characters. Selling over six million copies, Myst was the best-selling PC game ever until The Sims hit the scene in 2002.
Riven was first released on five discs in 1997 and is set immediately after the events of Myst. It went on to become the best-selling game of 1997, with fans and critics praising its realism, puzzles, and narrative depth. In the new open letter on Cyan’s website, the dev team notes that unlike Myst, there had never been a play to remake Riven until a certain grassroots effort began. The Starry Expanse Project, a fan project started over a decade ago, aimed to recreate the game in a fully-realized realtime-3D environment. Cyan eventually reached out to the group of fans.
“We reached an agreement which allowed us to reference core pieces of their efforts to jump-start our development,” the letter reads. “They subsequently ceased development on The Starry Expanse Project, as our official efforts to remake Riven began.
So on this 25th anniversary, now that Riven is officially old enough to rent a car in the United States, we hope our fans can rest easy knowing that you haven’t seen the last of Riven! And when you get a chance, please thank the members of the Starry Expanse team for being a part of its creation and for keeping the dream alive.”
