review

By flotsam

Defy Reality Entertainment / MicroProse

(a work in progress)

Games like Riven are my thing. Solitary first person explorations in immersive worlds, vague objectives needing to be picked apart, observation and logic front and centre and inventories distinctly in the back seat - Riven itself is what nailed my love of the adventure genre. So when a game proclaims its “in the style” of Riven, I am immediately on board.

Which comes with potential pitfalls. As I wrote about another such game many years ago “high expectations can unfairly result in reduced impressions.” By which I mean that if you associate yourself with Riven, I will hold you to a high standard and judge you accordingly.

Whether that is fair or not, it is what it is.

So let me say up-front, after 4 hours of playtime I am a very satisfied adventurer.

Borrowing from the Steam page, Neyyah is set within a collection of remote almost abandoned islands, separated by a series of complex portal machinery and laced with the fingerprints of two intriguing cultures. You have been sent there by Vamir, on a matter of urgency. A wrong needs righting, one that will require you to traverse the islands, linking the portals, unlocking contraptions and deciphering clues as you go.

You might have gathered by my playtime and the ‘work in progress’ heads-up that I haven’t yet finished the game. I felt compelled though to put pen to paper, given the impending release, and am confident that I can safely tell you more than I would in a first look. I will come back and update things when I do in fact finish.

You will get a distinctive (original) Riven vibe from the very get go, including the node-to-node progression. You can turn left or right, and perhaps look up or down, and helpfully you will also be told whether turning from any node will change your point-of-view by 90 or 180 degrees, improving the efficiency of exploring your environment. Whilst I prefer the go anywhere freedom of the remastered Riven, this form of exploration still provides a more than satisfactory explorative environment.

The visuals help. The pre-rendered screens provide an artistic opportunity when it comes to detail, and while the colour is a tad muted, the islands themselves and their structures are enticing places, drawing you on. Lighting is a treat, and whilst each screen is largely static, the ambient sound and things like the shimmer of the sea help the sense of realism. Various environmental animations (doors opening, levers moving, etc.) add another element, and I recently unlocked a vary Riven-ish ride to somewhere else.

Sure I would love a more dynamic world, but I didn’t feel a bit disappointed.

The curser will indicate when something can be done (e.g., zoom in, pick up, use an item etc). Puzzling has to date been to gather information and use it to solve codes, or restore or redirect power, to open up more areas and do the same again. Some inventory items have been involved, but as an adjunct to the logic.

How you progress through the game is something relatively within your control. To start with, three different Journey Modes are available, which you can switch between as you go, and which provide a lesser or more degree of feedback and (possible) assistance. The Guided by Ancients mode provides the most feedback, providing notifications of new maps and locations, tutorials for controls and features, and Travellers Guide notifications (more of them a bit later). The two other Modes provide lesser and then no notifications, although you can tweak certain aspects should you want to.

From within the game you can also access various Journey Tools. The Traveller’s Guide records various observations, often complete with image, and perhaps pushing you in the right next direction (and those notifications I mentioned before will tell you something has been added). The Main Goals describes the things you need to do in order to finish the game, and the Character Interaction allows you to replay interactions with the other characters you might encounter. Each is accessed via specific keyboard shortcuts, or the Escape key brings up a ribbon top of screen where you can point and click the relevant tile to access your desired tool.

That same ribbon also contains tiles for your inventory, journals you gather, and maps that build as you go, as well as for the more rudimentary game mechanics (e.g., save, options, quit). There is also a Payetta Case tile, which contains culturally specific items and one which is still greyed out which remains to be revealed.

The Options tile warrants further mention. As well as the more usual options (e.g., subtitles on or off, adjust music volume) you can enable a fast travel mode, which will enable you to skip intervening nodes and jump to an endpoint, (although you can progress node to node should you prefer) and also turn on colour blind mode, which will tell you the colour you are looking at (which can be important in certain puzzles). Having fiddled, I turned both on using the former sparingly and the latter when a colour puzzle presented itself.

Another thing worth mentioning is that notwithstanding the Travellers Guide, you should still take notes. Things I wanted to know weren’t always captured by the Guide, so your pen and paper is still required. Indeed, I intend to turn off all notifications for the next little while and to manually record anything I think I might need.

I Googled a bit and found that this has been about seven years in the making, and reflects the sunny and warm environments of the Australian based developers. Both those things are incidental plusses.

I have currently accessed a secret lab, which took some getting to and which contains a fair degree of information. I am drawing breath, reflecting on what and where I am at and considering where to next. My Riven gene has been feted by what has come before, and I look forward to what is to come.

Update

I am about 18 hours of playtime in (give or take the need to access a walkthrough and leaving the game running to attend to real life events) and am relatively close to the end (I think) but also thoroughly stuck.

I like being stuck. Its kind of the point; get stuck, review what you know, revisit locations, and winkle the stuckness out.

That said, Neyyah is a big place, full of different geographic locations and a plethora of spaces within them. It also contains a lot of information, in the journals you find, the notes you read, the systems you access, and the video messages you might uncover, not to mention the clues you might discover in the environment. Which makes for plenty of open adventuring and intricate puzzling.

It’s a big plus, but also a potential roadblock.

For instance, when a door won’t unlock for some reason, what that reason is might be largely unfathomable. This happened; I came across a door, thought I done everything necessary, but it wouldn’t open. Why it wouldn’t open I had no idea, and no amount of revisiting the information I had uncovered suggested a way forward. It turned out I had missed turning a lever in one spot earlier on. My bad for not exploring properly, but unless I missed a clue, there is no way I would have thought to go back to that location to look for a lever, which resulted in a degree of aimless wandering in the hope of finding something, until I gave up and accessed a walkthrough.

Which in itself is not straightforward, given the openness of how you might have progressed in the game.

Perhaps there was a clue. And yes, I should have searched more carefully. But there were other such times when what to do next or how to progress would have benefited from being a tad more obvious.

Which doesn’t mean I want paint by numbers, and I love being dropped into a realm such as this that requires unravelling, but sometimes a little bit less can be a lot more. There is so much information here to go back over, and so many places to revisit, that it can feel overwhelming at times.

A bit like the one I am currently involved in.

Nonetheless I remain a very big fan, and would readily recommend Neyyah to anyone who likes these sorts of games. It is challenging and engrossing, frustrating and fascinating. It looks a treat, sounds quite wonderful, and warrants just hanging about (nature abounds if you look carefully). It’s elaborate in almost every respect – the puzzles, the story and the environment – and I look forward to wrestling my way out of my current impasse.

As I indicated earlier, the game also collects a heap of information as you go, helpfully collating it by location. I would have liked a search function, and I still recommend taking your own notes, but it helps keep track of many relevant bits and pieces.

I did hit a bug, which the maker helped me overcome. Kudos to him. He is responsive at the Steam discussions, and will patch and/or solve issues brought to his attention. If only every maker was as attentive.

I will give you my final observations when I finish.

I played on:

OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit

Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz

RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB

Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192NB

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