Myst & Riven – PS5 / PSVR2 Game Review
Myst was a phenomenon when it launched in 1993. The game was a bit of a magic trick at the time, stitching together 3D rendered still images and animated videos to create graphics that looked better than most polygonal games of the era. It was also a point-and-click adventure, a genre that didn’t require fast reaction time or skill on a controller. That combination gave it mainstream appeal and made it one of the most popular and successful games of the era. Its sequel, Riven, was almost as popular.
Today, that mix of casual dexterity requirements and devious puzzle design is less rare. Games with advanced 3D visuals are a dime a dozen, and there are several point-and-click adventures and deep puzzle games released every year. The kids that had fond memories of Myst and Riven went on to make their own modern puzzle games. Some of the best games of the last decade, such as The Witness, Outer Wilds, Blue Prince, and Return of the Obra Dinn take clear inspiration from Myst and its sequels. Cyan Worlds (the creators of this series) still operates today, putting out new puzzle games and ports of the Myst series on a semi-regular basis.
So, in a relatively crowded market, where the Myst series’ appeal is objectively less special than it was at the time, where do remakes of the first two games fit in?
The answer really depends on how you came to the series. My memories of the original Myst are specific to a Sega kid raised on Sonic and Streets of Rage 2. I played the game with a friend who owned it on Sega Saturn. Our pointing and clicking was more like fumbling around on a controller and enduring the slow loading times of an inferior console port. Not to mention, our brains simply weren’t developed enough to understand the puzzles.
We still poured over every inch of the game thanks to a strategy guide that doubled as a piece of Myst fan fiction. The guide was written from the perspective of a character who finds the Myst book at the library and gets transported to Myst island. From there they tell their story of going around and solving all the puzzles — providing puzzle solutions while doubling as much-needed context for a confounding game.
I couldn’t tell you if that combo of cheating my way through Myst while sharpening my reading skills was a big influence, but it feels like an oddly foundational moment for a particular corner of my gaming tastes. Those puzzle games I mentioned earlier—the ones that owe a debt to Myst’s early success—are some of my favorite games of all time.
I have a journal of all the doodles and notes I’ve compiled playing various hardcore puzzle games. Inside are drawings of strange symbols and arrows from Animal Well, translations of roman numerals from Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and a folded up sheet of paper with the solution to the final puzzle in Tunic. In Myst, characters leave behind clues to puzzle solutions in the margins of their journals. In real life, I leave an insane notebook of puzzle spoilers for every game that challenged me enough to take notes.
In that context, I really didn’t know how Myst, one of the foundational grand-daddys of the modern puzzle game, would hold up.
But revisiting it in 2026, it’s no wonder Myst was a phenomenon with older adults and people who had never played a video game before. It wasn’t just fancy graphics and casual gameplay — Myst was a masterfully designed game. Sure, a lot of modern puzzle games eventually become more challenging than Myst (I’ve heard Riven is harder but I haven’t completed that one yet), but it’s still a fun, brain-y puzzle game that felt closer to its modern counterparts than I anticipated.
In fact, most of the times I struggled with puzzles, it was less about the puzzles themselves, and more about the remake’s awkward controls and button prompts. While the Myst and Riven remakes translate these glorified Powerpoint presentations into fully 3D first-person games with VR support, they lose something in the translation from simple mouse clicks to full twin-stick controller support.
It’s an odd issue considering these remakes aren’t the first ones to offer modern controls, nor are they truly recent remakes themselves. While they only just came out for Playstation and PSVR2, modern Myst has been available on PC since 2021 and Riven since 2024. There has been plenty of time to clean up controls and make button prompts more clear, and yet the prompts are often confusing or flat-out wrong. This led me to follow some incorrect leads, getting stuck in spots just because I genuinely didn’t know a switch could be moved in a particular way.
It’s a bit of a revelation to go into a VR version of a game from your childhood. But even that eventually wears off. When the puzzles got tough, I found myself preferring my TV screen and a notepad instead of a sweaty VR headset and awkward waggle controls.
Movements like climbing a ladder or turning pages in a book are performed through a combination of arm motions and clicking buttons on the PSVR2 controllers that simulate a squeezing or grabbing motion. I often found myself glitching up and down ladders, trapped in the middle of the climb, instead of cleanly navigating to the top. In Riven, the first book I tried to read required massive, ridiculous sweeping arm motions to turn pages correctly.
These issues made the game tedious to play in VR. The motions were often unnecessarily dramatic and made it a chore to play in a comfy armchair—the perfect place to get lost in an engrossing puzzle game—instead I had to switch to a standing position to complete a puzzle or leave VR entirely. One puzzle in Myst seems nearly impossible without drawing some kind of map, and taking notes with a VR headset on isn’t really an option.
Riven’s issues were even more damning. In my last VR session with the game, I rode a fun little railcar from one island to another. The game skips this sequence by default as a comfort measure, but I wanted to see it in VR. Of course I want to ride the rollercoaster in VR! But, upon adjusting the settings and getting back into the railcar, the game dropped into what felt like sub-30 frames per second for the whole ride. This is a huge no-no and sickness inducer for VR. It’s so bad that I’m curious how they passed certification with a puke coaster not even 20 minutes into the game.
Getting out of the railcar, my character’s VR right hand was gone. My controller was still on, but nothing worked to reset position and get control back. Perhaps my right arm was caught in a mechanism at the start of the railcar ride and my character’s invisible body was stretched from one island to another, causing a huge framerate drop. Who can say for sure? Either way, that was the end of my time playing Riven in VR.
So yeah, Myst and Riven themselves—the 1990s bones of the games under the hood—are as timeless as ever. These remakes though? There I feel a little more conflicted.
It’s almost worse that the remakes exist. The VR experience can be novel when it isn’t glitching or committing unforgivable motion sickness crimes, but it’s ultimately a distracting and gimmicky layer that detracts from the core game.
Outside of VR, the games are closer to capturing the purity of the originals in a modern wrapper, but they are just rough enough that I feel like you’re kind of breaking even by playing these over the originals. I’m genuinely left at a loss for the best way to revisit these classic games.
It’s not as simple as saying, “forget these remakes, just play the classics.” I genuinely think the transition to fully 3D environments is a big improvement that gives the puzzle design more clarity. It is clear that the original games were imagined in 3D and then translated down into a series of images stitched together. That original format was a limitation that made the games harder to parse than the developers intended.
Gun to my head, I still prefer these modern remakes to the original games, despite the flaws in controls, glitches, and poor VR experience. I still think, if you have fond memories of Myst island from your childhood, it is worth walking around in VR a little bit, just for the nostalgia hit. From there, just play the games with a normal controller in front of your TV, in a comfy chair.
Myst and Riven are perfect games to lose yourself in on a quiet weekend, and these remakes are the most approachable versions for the typical gamer in 2026. I just wish they got the polish and attention to detail deserving of such foundational and classic games.
Red Ring Circus 