I think I touched on the fact that I used to play through puzzle games with my roommate. Our brains operated differently enough that, between the two of us we could generally solve most puzzles. Myst was probably the third game we played through together, with The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time being the first one, and Riven being the second one.
And in all honesty, I think that this did affect my outlook on Myst. If we had played Myst first and then Riven I would have felt as though I'd been tossed into a world with entirely different mechanics, but because we'd played Riven first, Myst felt like a step back in most respects.
For example, the fact that objects in Myst were numbered or labeled in plain English. By contrast, Riven had its own language and you had to decode the numbering system by manipulating various objects. While Myst was made up of several smaller "Ages", Riven was mostly one big world. Of course, the graphics were a bit of a step back as well, but I'm not going to hold that against Myst.
Then there are the unnecessarily convoluted or otherwise "unfair" challenges. The one I remember in particular is the underground cart in one of the Ages. The entrance looks exactly like the exit, so even when you think you've arrived and you get out of the cart, you don't really know until you climb up and take a look outside. In fact, I'm pretty sure we did get to the exit one time, only it looked exactly like the entrance, so we got right back in the cart and started looking around again! I understand that you can figure out a puzzle like this by process of elimination, but it feels as though some challenges were just there to artificially lengthen the process of exposition.
But, when all is said and done, we wouldn't have Riven without Myst. And Riven is still one of my all time favorites, despite having a few "unfair" or lazy challenges of its own.
