Let's Play Riven (2024 Remake) Part 4 - The Moiety & BAD ENDINGS 

Keith talking about the themes of Myst and Riven's story, and going on video essay-lite tangents is what drew me as a viewer watching his Riven playthrough for the first time a couple of years ago, and it's so fun and satisfying seeing him basically expound a lot of what he said initially but with even more thought and stronger nuance this episode is my kind of shit right here

I love the Myst and Riven videos because of how well-informed Keith is on the themes at play behind them. Thank you for walking through all the connections! It's incredible to hear someone expounding on them and sharing them with a new audience 25 years after reading them as a kid.

That's the most organic bad ending discovery I could have hoped for. See you next time.

1:43:55 Linking Books can only be created when you are already in the Age you want to link to. The “spawn point” becomes where you physically write the book. So the only way Catherine could get back to Myst (or Gehn could get back to D’ni) is for someone to come to Riven with an existing Linking Book.

Dude I hope they continue re releasing this whole series. Myst games are full slay

The idea that the writers don't actually create Ages they write is this: if a change is theoretically possible within the existing world, the book will continue to link to the same world. For example, there's nothing in Riven that says there COULDN'T be a bunch of daggers floating in space that could eventually fall down, so the writer could write that into the book and continue linking to the same world without issue. Whereas if the writer said "I don't like all this sandstone, I want it to be basalt instead" then that would result in the book taking them to a completely new world.

This game is just full of beautiful aesthetics every step you go! 😮

Some of the best commentary on this game, you know enough but not too much, you take the time to actually look at everything and it is in an organic order since you arent just doing a speed run. Very enjoyable for a superfan like me who enjoys seeing ppl play their own way and not just the “leet optimal way”

Came for the Riven playthrough, stayed for the feminist, anti-colonialist, resistance mini video essay and gay furry art

Another fantastic mini-video-essay in this episode. I really appreciate you sharing these thoughts despite not having them organized.

D'ni number is base 25, rivenese numbers should be base 12 unless they go 3 arrows long after a full revolution of the double arrow double direction. base 12 because 12 unique symbols for a single digit.

Thanks for the essay-lite rant. Looking forward to the full rant 💚 chip away at it. I hope your have a solid note making system

You can use the R key as a hotkey for the rebel lens

For the record, that square shaped hole in the geography at about 26:00 (that Keith thinks is a glitch) is actually (most likely) the vent shaft above the cave where you find the submarine.

It's really interesting going along with you and doing the game at the same time. I'm way ahead of you at this point with some things but you showed me the Totem symbols but i spotted that the had to turn on the water to see that one first And now you're missing the extra pull on the lever. Very frustrating to see someone not getting something when you know. Anyway well done for doing this it's very entertaining

"That was rude!" (after getting darted). . . got a good chuckle outa me! ;)

1:24:05 Honestly, I feel like that should definitely have happened somehow in 30 years. The rebels clearly have skills blowing darts and, surely, if they saw Catherine incapacitated, they should try to incapacitate Gehn as well (since they think he's a lesser god than Catherine). Not to mention numerous other ways it could've gone bad for Gehn in the 30 years, even accounting for the fact that people cannot conceive of him getting hurt.

1:45:00 improvised it might be, but probably the best Myst themes video essay on RU-vid. This is why I rewatch all of your Myst videos every year or so. Keith, some random thoughts spinning off yours in no particular order: 1. The women are defo the heroes . Half remembered, but I believe in BoA when Atrus meets Katran, he's all 'Agh, she's so beautiful, but she's in Gehn's spell and he'll abuse her! Katran, I need to get you out of here!'. Katran: 'Ssh, dummy, I know he's a jerk, I'm just pretending to get close to him, earn his trust, learn some sweet Art, and protect my people. Chill out, I got this. Also, check out my sick Ages I wrote that are way better than yours." She plays this subterfuge so well that Atrus, despite developing a romance with her, is convinced she's actually betraying him and siding with Gehn right at the end (spoiler alert, she's not). 1a. Let us also not forget Anna (Ti'ana). Despite her disappearing from BoA after Atrus and Gehn leave the Cleft, she was actually trailing them from the very beginning, through the cave system secretly, watching everything they did and ready to intervene if necessary/once Atrus sussed out his dad was nuts. She meets Katran at some point during this, and they team up to formulate the plan to free the Rivenese and Atrus and trap Gehn on Riven (along with writing Myst as a safe refuge). This is a fun fact a lot of people either forget or don't know - the eponymous age of the games is not written by Atrus, but by Catherine and Anna. And that's before even talking about Yeesha. 2. I love Atrus for the more fleshed out person they made him (a little bit post hoc maybe, but still) as the series and books progressed. I think despite his flaws in raising his children (let's also not forget they are also Catherine's children and were also co-raised for several years by Anna) and his blind spots regarding the D'ni, he is fundementally a person with a strong ethical core who has eschewed all the trappings of the D'ni ideologically and materially, despite being the one who get's resoration rolling and ending up being it seems the de facto leader of the D'ni remnant. He was mature enough and equipped enough by his grandmother to see through the hollow image his father projected, even though he wanted nothing more than for Gehn and for the D'ni to be everything his childhood self had always wanted them to me. The beauty to me of the early part of BoA is that all of that attention to detail, that love of science and the natural world, his care for others, are all things that Anna planted in him with her love, knowledge and wisdom. Not Gehn, not the D'ni. Gehn sees it as poisoning, but it is actually everything Ti'ana wish she could have given to Gehn but was unable to (I think in part because she had to try to do so in the immediate wake of the loss of her husband, D'ni, her whole world, while trying to start from nothing in the Cleft, an idea that is actually given more explicit voice in the 233 imager in this version of Riven). 3. While I get your objections to 'linking to existing worlds in the multiverse' (e.g the only possible way linking to existing worlds really can make sense of giant daggers spawning into riven is to go "Well, that Catherine lady sure is good at them there writings, ain't she?"), it is interesting to consider creating/linking in the context of a post-colonial reading, and how those differing perspectives play out with Gehn and Atrus, and how they approach and justify their actions in respect of the Ages. That dynamic is interesting enough for me that I prefer to leave it an open question about which is actually create about the nature of the Art. 4. Just because you brought it up somewhere, Catherine's plan proposes taking the Tay Descriptive Book from Riven (presumably, if it's not already in Tay), and then destroying all the Linking Books to Tay in Riven (which are also presumably the only ones in existence). The Descriptive Book is the one that creates/starts the first link to an age, Linking Books refer to the Descriptive Book and are links to that same age. A Linking Book is written in the Age it refers to, and connects to the spot where it is written/completed. Under the Created Age hypothesis, it is presumably impossible to write a second Descriptive Book to the same Age (because otherwise it would not be creating an age), thus in Catherine's initial plan before being imprisoned by Gehn, she will never see Atrus or her sons again as no one will be able to link to Tay using books in Riven (or any other world Atrus is known to have access to), and she cannot write linking books to D'ni/Myst/etc Under the Multiverse hypothesis, as there are an infinite number of worlds, and any given Descriptive Book, no matter how specific or detailed, will still link to some plural subset of that infinite number of worlds, it is nearly mathematically impossible to write a second Descriptive Book to the same actual world. Thus, in Catherine's initial plan, it is a near certainty she will never see Atrus and her sons (or at least her Atrus or sons) again.

26:00 - I don't think that's a glitch. I think that's the skylight to the cave where the underwater tram parks.

1:54:41 "How do you hold 8 games and 3 books in your head at once?" Welcome to MatPat's (former) theorizing nightmare: the FNAF franchise "currently consists of a total of 21 video games (10 main games, 7 spin-offs, and 4 troll games), a total of 51 books (3 novels, 21 anthology books, 8 graphic novels, 3 interactive novels, 5 guidebooks, 3 coloring books, and 8 random, miscellaneous books), as well as a horror attraction, Snapchat lenses, a movie, and a slew of merchandise" 🐻🍕 I don't know how much this helps, but I know MatPat not only has a "conspiracy whiteboard" (maybe using it to build a concept map could help), but also keeps book versions that allow digital notes.

All these contraptions and elevators feel extremely unsafe. Like I'm surprised they have guardrails with how open all the elevators are.

1:07:26 yaaay, it's reading time! You seem to have a bit of a tough time with, uh, calligraphic writing. Spoilers below: 1:57:33 man, you can actually explore some of Tay in the remake... really freaking cool.

It looks like the order of the animals is randomized. It was different in my playthrough.

Great series, thankyou!

Somehow I missed the underwater cave and had to guess what the fourth symbol was 😢

Wait, why does the linking book at 2:00:24 work by itself? Katran's journal explicitly says at 1:37:46 that the linking book back to Riven would require augmentation to function.

44:09 Maybe the Sunner asset spawning/despawning caused the jump? Doesn't seem very polished tbh.

Lol, I face palmed when Keith didn't take the sub back to the starting platform to go up the elevator and instead went the long way around. I've done stuff like that so many times ahaha. Myst online is basically just Uru. You can get some fan-made ages because it is open source but otherwise, it is basically the same canon as Uru. I got lazy with the fissure puzzle. I used it initially to give me the numbers for 1 through 10. It was easier than using the dice roller game. Then, doing the puzzle I just reset all of the numbers to one and counted up so I only needed to translate the Rivenese numbers into Arabic numerals. It made the puzzle a bit less obtuse, at least for me.

Why is there smoke coming out of the top of the hive when you’re looking at it from the outside but not from the inside?

3/4 circle fish lmao

Seeing you puzzling your way through that animal-plinth situation in the Moiety's secret cave, I dread to think how much you'd need to write down to get through the original version of Riven. Better set aside a folder to keep it all in...

Pretty sure the symbols on the Golden Dome's windows don't seem to match up at all? The one for the Temple Island matches, but none a the others do, oddly enough... Unless the color for each dome is actually different from the color marked on the golden dome? I dunno, maybe I'm not thinking correctly about this... Hmm, wait, on second thought, maybe it was my perspective that was wrong... Maybe the two diagrams aren't meant to match as immaculately as I had thought. 16:29 ahhhhh dude, you were so close...

1:32:57 actually, the age you read as "98" isn't that number, nor an earlier attempt - it was the only age he managed to write ever since his imprisonment in Riven. It is Age 233. You misread the D'ni number due to a rule they uh... honestly still don't explain super well regarding numbers of multiple D'ni digits.

i use my phone to take screen shots ^.^

Please use the established terms to avoid confusion! Temple island Jungle Island Boiler Island Survery Island Prison Island

Gehn girl

These characters really need to give up cursive and just write plain letters. This is hard to read even for me, a 40 year old who hasnt used cursive since elementary school