I'm much more impressed by this than, say, the complex assembly puzzles in Lighthouse . And that is a matter of snooping around, seeing what it's connected to, what it looks like, what it sounds like. I see that I'm onto puzzles. This puts me in some confusion. Riven is, at the same time, one of the hardest games I've played, and one of the most solvable games I've played.
Any idiot can make an unsolvable puzzle with unreadable clues.
I've done plenty of it. I solved Riven in three days, a bit over twenty hours of play time. Aside from that one hint, I solved it all myself. It was not an easy game. I glared and sweated, and I goggled and gasped when the pieces came together in my head.