Puzzle-narrative game roundup: Paranormasight 2 review, Riven (2024) review, first-time thoughts on Riven (1997) and Myst (1993), and others
First off, I'm waiting to write a full review when the entire suite is finished, but of the Devil episode 2 came out recently and it's absolutely sauced up. Get in on the ground floor of this game, it is shaping up to be the student of Ace Attorney that surpasses its master and I do not say that lightly.
Anyways, here are a bunch of narrative-puzzle games I've played in the past several months. Unbeknownst to me I've been on a kick of these.
★★★★★ for RIVEN (2024)
I'm really glad I played the original Myst before this because it prepared me for the "orthogonal gimmick" puzzle logic that Riven's very first puzzle asks you to solve. If I hadn't, I might have been colored with the idea that Riven is occasionally just kind of cheap with some puzzle solutions from a cynical modern perspective. But Riven is not a game for cynics. Riven is a beautiful thing that asks the player to collaborate and be a proactive thinker in its puzzles, like some of my favorite games - "you get out what you put in", in a phrase.
Funnily enough, after finishing the 2024 Riven, I played through most of the original 1997 version and discovered almost every puzzle had been reworked and the game's critical path had been totally rethought. In one notable case this is arguably a dumbing-down of a frictional part of the original (the submarine controls), in another it's arguably just adding an extra layer for the sake of changing things (the number system).
As a whole, though, I think the sweeping changes argue themselves as improvements. The new pacing & pathing in particular feels great, with careful meting-out of leads and puzzle information without leaving you at truly dead ends or overwhelming you with new things to think about. The larger puzzles are spread throughout the world and encourage you to keep revisiting areas and thinking, and the small puzzles with minor solution changes aren't of a totally different mind than the original: there are still many solutions that are sly little tricks, very in-character for the games.
This is still the same studio, even if we have to cope with decent 3D actors in this version replacing the FMV swag of the original, and it's the same game, reimagined thoroughly but still sharp as the original was in its time: damn sharp.
Final time: around 11 hours + a few hours of going through most of the original with help from a walkthrough.
rather ungrateful ★★★☆☆ for Myst (1993)
Blog sidenote: wrote this before playing Riven at all, after playing Riven i'm a bit more positive on Myst's place in things but I still think the game itself is just fine. Honestly with how much the Riven remake changed I'm tempted to fork over the $35 for the 2021 remake of Myst as well...
Definitely believe this was very remarkable at the time; very little of it actually holds up well but it wasn't a miserable experience (except for, obviously, the maze). Tough to delineate what objects are actually useful for puzzles and which are just toys because 3D graphics are cool (and they are - some of the lovely morsels of joy in the game are the stupid little animated objects that have no purpose other than being animated). This is one of the few classic art pieces where I feel like, yeah, this kind of is just superceded by other games. But it's a piece of history, so, you know.
Final time: like 5-6 hours, I think?
Additional blog sidenote: I tried "realMyst: Masterpiece Edition" first on the Switch and boy that was not the right move. Some of the areas may work better in its 3D-explorable world, but the static rendered angles of the original are just better at directing your attention towards what matters, because the island's design itself is not that good at helping a player understand what's important and what's not. The cursor controls are ill-fitted to the Switch as well, and while I realize there's a real irony in complaining about the framerate in a version of fucking Myst, the framerate on this version did its ostensibly-upgraded immersiveness no favors when the prerendered static-angled original has no such problem by its nature.
★★★★☆ for Paranormasight 2: The Mermaid's Curse
First off, I preferred the tension and individual character stories of the first game, compared to this game's greater cooperation and somewhat centralized plot. There was, similarly to the first game, also some real gluts of exposition (early chapters of Avi & Circe especially, yeesh). But! The storytelling in general, the presentation, and the meta puzzles are all exemplary, and the character work does feel a little smoother than the first game. (I don't know if I loved anyone as much as Tetsuo and Harue, but it got close, and overall the cast was better.) Highly recommended, really hope we get another one!! Final time: around 15 hours for 100%.
(also the Mocking Bird music is fucking awesome holy shitttttttttt)
Blog sidenote: Paranormasight 1 is awesome, played that last year. Play that too.
★★★☆☆ for Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved
Writing is dated in such an odd, quaint way. Art is great and high effort throughout the game's short runtime. Ultimately the game really says nothing except "treat immigrants better, in general"; there's very little unique in the text to actually recommend the game beyond being a nice art gallery with good music and an okay mystery, with a couple of funny moments few and far between. I'm interested in a follow-up with more time to develop a mystery that's actually interesting but I honestly don't know that this first one is worth playing.
Also, it's crazy that [rot13 spoilers] bggb'f oybbq ba uvf sebag vf fhccbfrq gb or sebz tynff gung phg uvz jvguva n dhnegre bs n frpbaq nf ur sryy bhg bs n jvaqbj onpxjneqf, naq gura jnf tenoovat uvf fgbznpu rknpgyl yvxr ur jnf fubg va gur thg whfg orpnhfr ur jnf irel fvpx jura gur vapvqrag unccrarq? V pna'g gryy vs vg'f fhccbfrq gb or n zvfqverpg rkpyhfviryl sbe gur cynlre be whfg n pbvapvqrapr ohg vg ernyyl naablf zr, gb fnl abguvat nobhg gur vqrn gung n thl pbhyq trg fb bss-onynapr va n ubgry ebbz gung ur snyyf bhg bs gur qnza jvaqbj, jvgubhg gur grkg whfgvslvat vg nf yvxr "jr fghzoyrq bire gb gur jvaqbj" be fbzrbar erznexvat "jbj gubfr jvaqbjf fher ner ybj gb gur tebhaq" be nalguvat nf rira unys na rkphfr.
Final time: around 5-6 hours.
★★uhhh the half star character is still kind of new in unicode but it's 2.5☆☆ for The Séance of Blake Manor
holy shit Dracula really did all that?
to me this is a game that impressively demonstrates how capturing every single piece of logical evidence and connections in the computer, and having it all automatically fill out and connect, removes the weight of information from the player. Solving a mystery in, say, Golden Idol, feels like I've done some real exercise. Solving a mystery in this feels like I just performed the job of a 'good player' and looked all around the rooms using my Detective Vision, even clicking lots of incidental things with nothing important in them just for the one time there's something in a coat pocket or a book hidden behind others on a shelf, so that my Mind Spreadsheet in-game will update with the right information; then I'll be able to fill in a very obvious Golden Idol-style mad lib to solve the problem of a charmless character of no importance to the larger mystery. Repeat roughly 20 times and that's about how it felt to play this game.
The character art is awkward at best, although O'Meara's art at least approaches a little bit of Venture Bros.-style charm. The 3D art and environment design feels bog-standard. The colors and style of everything is horrendously flat. And here I thought Blue Prince would be the most awkwardly-styled first-person mystery game set on a large manor estate published by Raw Fury in 2025!
final time: 16 hours or so. completed the best ending on first playthrough (with a small amount of guide-checking towards the end)
★★★★☆ for Dead Letter Dept.
i really did kinda feel like i was going to be possessed lol. excellent work on every axis. great choice of extra anecdotes and creepy shit just to add to atmosphere, and doesn't outstay its welcome - maybe it could have been another half hour longer of escalation? very few notes, great game.
Final time: something like 3-4 hours.
★★dammit another half star, it's 2.5☆☆ for Eclipsium
rankly, just too long and the music was too understandable for how abstract and fucked up much of the art was. It starts very raw and excitingly horrific but gets less and less interesting as it goes on, until you're vanquishing a big snake with a magic sword from paintings you went inside. A friend called some of the music "epic video game trailer music"-core and I felt it. I'm a bit annoyed as well because I ran into a softlock which seems unacknowledged on steam threads for something like 3 months, and the autosave system is conservative enough to put me several minutes of autoscroller before the section, and it was like 10 minutes before the end of the game. There's so much slow walking I just couldn't be arsed to redo it. Final time: around 4 hours (god, really? it felt like nearly 6)
I do like the art in general and the very Myst/Riven nature of the world and the general puzzles - it shows a good understanding of their precursors. I think one big missing element to this is a larger macro puzzle that ties things together. A game that's a series of sections with self-contained puzzles is fine, but Eclipsium reaches the runtime where it's too clearly just idea-after-idea without a buildup of gameplay to feel like a holistic thing, and the art builds up a bit more successfully but still has its issues (I don't care about vanquishing a snake with a sword in the 2020s. If your game isn't rigorously about vanquishing snakes with swords from fantasy paintings, I think it may just be a shark-jump to vanquish a snake with a sword from a fantasy painting, as a rule.)
★★★☆☆ for Silent Hill 𝑓
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Final time: around 30 hours, endings 1, 3, 4 seen, and endings 2 and 5 watched online.
I have a really high opinion of Ryukishi, and I think for 90% of this the themes were really cooking; but the true ending really spilled all that on the floor. I’m sympathetic to Kotoyuki, but the narrative either absolves him of any blame or, worse, casts nearly everything horrific that happened in the game as just the hallucinations of one girl. These things are not just the hallucinations of one girl! The larger-than-life social pressures of misogyny and family are the perfect fit for this premise, but it’s so disappointing to have not a single character except Hinako reflect on their relationship to society and those pressures, and Hinako only does so repeatedly in the most obvious ways possible (“why does everyone think marriage is the only way for a woman to be happy?” over and over). It feels like subtextually, the game is asking incisive, powerful questions constantly and then when it comes time to answer them, it just runs away.
Aside from the writing which might have been the most disappointing part somehow (almost entirely because of the true ending), the visual design of the game is drop-dead gorgeous at every step. The puzzles are generally interesting if not logically super sound (scarecrows puzzle still confuses me a bit) – we played on Lost in the Fog puzzle difficulty first which was sometimes interesting but mostly seemed to have subpar hint quality, at least in the localization. Hard puzzle difficulty seemed like the sweet spot although still had some strange solutions and/or translations, along with at least one pretty monotonous maze-level layout, but there were enough puzzles that felt right for the setting that I liked them overall. The combat was totally unimaginative in 2025 but I didn’t grow to hate it or anything, it functioned alright on Story difficulty and gave enough friction for its part.
All this could have been in service of something profound, but instead as it comes time for an ending the game offers up either, frankly, cowardly answers, or no answers at all. For fuck’s sake, we have a climactic scene of Hinako’s mom talking about how she must seem weak but she feels she has the real power in the relationship. This scene is immediately and violently t-boned as a followup by finding a letter saying that her husband knows she’s dying of an illness and hasn’t told her (accurate to the time period, as far as I'm aware), and there is NO FOLLOW UP. That’s such a brutal, powerful, cogent thing to do authorially. Surely you can’t do that by accident! But then nothing else happens with those characters. So what the fuck! Maybe studio meddling cut out the key part, the one that recontextualizes the recontextualizations into something smart, but it doesn't really feel like it - it feels like it just did that on its own. No matter the circumstances, man is it a disappointing end result.