I’m taking the Ages in the order their principles appeared in Atris’ journal, so Edanna, the nature age, is next. It’s the one that interests me most conceptually, but aggravates me most in execution. The idea here is to show the player the interdependence within nature both within the environment and through the interaction of the player with the bird (the player first saves the bird and at the end of the Age the bird flies the player to end of the puzzle.) Color is an important indicator within Exile. As in nature, something brightly or vibrantly colored indicates you should pay attention to it.

My first problem is personal, though I wonder to what extent the developers intended this: I have trouble navigating the Age. Many times, I ‘step’ forward down path and am confronted with a wall of green or brown instead of a visible route. I then swing my view around and begin to generally click in the direction I believe the path continues, sometimes this works and sometimes I have to take a ‘step’ back to reorient myself and then try again. This is immensely frustrating, and after awhile I became slightly nauseated.

It’s fine for the game to have difficult-to-find spots and routes, but this felt as though what would be a relatively simple task in the real world became hard because of poor visual design. Then again, maybe the sense of disorientation was deliberate, but if so, how does that encourage the ‘nature rewards interdependence’ theme? If this were a horror game, I could understand – being chased by something nasty while you struggle to make your way through a thick, damp jungle and swamp sounds interesting.

(I assume here that my experience is average. It’s quite possible that I just have poor spatial analysis when it comes to busy 2d environments.)



For a nature age that stresses interdependence, Edanna has a very mechanical feel and there’s little evidence of interdependence. A glowing manta ray moves along a series of sacs on a vine pipeline but… why? How does this benefit the animal? How does it benefit the plant? The player appears to be the only creature who would press the ends of the sac and cause the manta ray to move from one place to another. It would die in the first sac without the player. In the end it, the animal ends up in a small pool of water with no steady food source or mate – I can’t see this as something nature would allow to go on for very long.

The environment exists only so the player can interact with it. The story exists to provide a reason for the player to interact with the environment and to explain how these elaborate environments were created. The problem is that plants and animals, unlike machines, have their own reason for existing as they do. A machine can exist only to provide a charge that causes another machine to react. A glowing manta ray cannot exist only to provide a charge that causes a giant venus fly trap to open.

Anyways, it took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to complete this Age. I began tinkering with the dynamic forces age and so far it's interesting.

Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (CAGAAV to his friends), invented the voltaic pile, what we call the battery. He lent his last name to his invention, as well as the volt, Voltron: Defender of the Universe, and the Voltaic Age in Myst III Exile. We can only wonder which of these he’d be most proud of, though I have to say that Defender of the UNIVERSE is damned impressive.

The Voltaic Age took me two and a half hours of play, not counting the time I alt+tabbed my way to a crash and had to redo fifteen minutes. The majority of this time I spent fiddling with red steam valves and wondering why I felt oddly attracted to the windows.

It’s the energy age, so the dominant imagery is mechanical stuff. How the original Star Trek portrayed future tech is how this portrays a hydroelectric, steam, and lava powered magnetic land floater.



I’m enjoying Exile so far. I’d forgotten that you could look around via the mouse and it’s vast improvement over the still images of Riven. There’s apparently an elaborate back-story involving the D’ni and the collapse of their civilization that I’ve missed – oh well. I vaguely remember reading a book about a woman from our world falling into a pit in the Sahara desert; apparently, the D’ni currently live under the surface of the earth. You’d think if you had magical books that could link you to hundreds of worlds, you might relocate your civilization to an Age that looked like Maui. Then again, this race neglects the use of locks, safes, and guard dogs for guarding their treasures, but instead constructs elaborate environmental puzzles. They’re a sort of dwarven Bond villain.

I talked about lower order vs higher order problem solving previously, and Exile has stayed firmly in the lower order end. One of the first puzzles you encounter is getting an elevator to work: there’s a notebook in the same room with pictures on how to arrange the mechanisms. The next puzzle is moving a giant ball via two levers. Then there’s one where light travels through a series of lenses. Each of these puzzles is a discrete entity – you either know immediately what needs to be done or it makes itself apparent after a bit of fiddling.

In Voltaic itself, I stumbled upon a puzzle that I solved without any thought: I went to one interface, moved a few pieces, then went to another other and while I was moving pieces, wondering if the numbers above the circuitry meant anything, the interface slammed closed and the device powered up. As there were five parts all together and I’d only touched two, I was a bit confused.

That said, the lower order puzzles are better handled than Riven’s. You tackle a series of manageable problems in Exile, as opposed to wandering around trying to get a handle on a few big puzzles while being tripped up by minutia. Neither approach is better, and in a way they reflect the natures of the men who built the puzzles: Gehn is a meticulous but brilliant bastard while Saavedro is an insane Brad Dourif in a bad wig.

Next I tackle the nature Age with the bird symbol.

Last night, I zipped through Riven at phenomenal speeds until the game crashed and I realized I hadn’t saved since the first island. I restarted, it forced me to start a new game, and then wouldn’t let me open the saved game. I believe I’ve had this problem since I bought it as I knew the solution was to go to the saved game file in the Riven folder and double click it. I then played until the puzzle island where you first encounter the grid. In the past I mapped out the location of the golden balls with graph paper – I have no idea why as a simple X,Y coordinate system notation does the trick.


The image to the right is my notes so far.

I’m not enjoying the game: it’s too easy. It’s not so much puzzle solving for me as data-gathering. What I’ve realized is that the reason I’m not enjoying the game is the same reason that it’s such a good game: it’s a series of higher order, or conceptual, puzzles.

Take an actual, jigsaw puzzle. On the box cover is an image and in the box is a set of pieces you connect together to make the image. The process is all lower order; the difficulty is fitting things together bit by bit in order to construct something you already know about. When I say Riven is higher-order I mean that it gives you the pieces and asks ‘What’s the larger image?’ The difficulty is in exploring the world and coming to understand the larger image. Once you get it, the pieces take no time to put together. [1]

I already understand the big picture – the rolling eyeballs represent an animal both visually and aurally, the number on the other side represents what order the animals come in – so I’m not puzzle solving, just picking up the list of animals and numbers.

I will probably uninstall and try Exile instead, which I don't recall finishing.


[1] – There are lower order puzzles in Riven as well in the form of finding the various hidden objects you have to operate, e.g., to lower the telescope, you have to notice the little stop that’s blocking it and move it out of the way. The lower order puzzles are binary though: Do you notice the stop or not? Did you close the doors behind you or not? Did you notice that you go under the locked gate or not?