I just got finished with beating Riven for the first time. I adored the way the game seeped into my real life with pages of notes about the world I was discovering. Are there any other games that can match this feeling? That really work best when you have a journal in hand?
World of Xeen
For the hardest dungeon you have to solve a crossword puzzle. In the game you can read a long story that contains all the answers but the puzzle is in a huge labyrinth far away from that story and it would be too tedious to change back and forth between the two.
The manuals of the games (it’s actually two games combined into one even larger game) have dedicated blank pages for notes at the end. I also had the way to the boss of the second game written down there.
Back then it was quite common for RPGs to have space for notes in the manuals.
I played that long ago (I had a MM1-5 collection on a CD-ROM).
I finished the Clouds of Xeen side without much trouble, I was even surprised when I realized I had found that part’s ending (I think, anyway). But I never could do any progress on Darkside… Not sure what I was missing.
Darkside is considerably harder. It’s easier when you finish Clouds first but you quickly reach a point where it also gets harder. I think a balanced party composition is also even more important.
When I was a child I didn’t understand that it was turn based. So whenever there was a monster I rapidly clicked the fight button without much regard to strategy. Made it even harder. Don’t think I managed to beat either game back then.
I thought that too for a while! I had played Lands of Lore first, and I just assumed MM worked the same way.
I liked Lands of Lore a lot, but it terrified me at times.