replaying riven and realizing how much of the plot is just ENTIRELY dependent on the (actually pretty good) spinoff novels lmao
like it says THE SEQUEL TO MYST on the box but almost nothing that happens in myst actually connects to anything in riven. Riven just directly proceeds from the books, and the events of myst are mostly, like, a b-plot where atrus's large adult sons cause a bunch of problems which distract him from his REAL mission of Dealing With The Riven Thing
playing it 20+ years later, I'm realizing the game makes NO effort to explain any of this. It probably came across as this super confusing in medias res thing when in fact it's really just a direct sequel to a book nobody read lol
genuinely really creative scifi, also has basically nothing to do with The Videogame Myst (1993) so it doesn't matter if you've played it. Gets super into the weeds on the whole, like, "myst is itself a metaphor for game development" thing where like, what if you got so good at gamedev you could make actual physical planets but then QA is a nightmare because if your code has any bugs it'll kill a fuckton of actual people