It's also a confused curse, as Myst and Riven were quite different games, and I shouldn't imply that a single magic ingredient informed both. For three days, I have been in gorgeous, spectacular places. I mean this. Stone is weathered, irregular, haphazard. Wood is organic.
Nothing is flat.
The deficits of most other games, with their polygonal rigidity and lattice maps, is achingly apparent in comparison. Even the human buildings in these worlds are more flowing than geometric. Each Age has its own character, of course. But the design sense never flags. And then at the end of the next Age, it happened again.