I finished Riven and I kind of hate it. Am I a bad person?
 

Riven: The Sequel to Myst is known for being a bitch pain in the balls, but in a good way. The hard puzzles are supposed to be satisfying to solve. Well, alright, that sounded good, so I started playing this with my girlfriend.

After a month or so, it ground to a halt. Turns out we were up to the game's ultimatest puzzle, the marble grid. But, we didn't really know how to solve it, so it wasn't clear if we weren't supposed to be able to solve it yet and failed to explore adequately, or what. We had some ideas but nothing panned out.

Now, this next part is partly my fault. Or, well, entirely my fault. But even if I hadn't screwed up like this, I would still find it lame. Some five months later, I retry the most obvious goddamn thing that I'm sure must have been one of the first things I tried, and it works. Fuck? I have been smashing my head against this thing for ages (hur dur) trying to find some magical amazing logic when it was all really quite stupid and straightforward.

Okay, the remainder of this is pretty much for people who finished the game.
The first problem is that it seems to come down to brute force. I mean, there are only two options, but still. Is there any way to actually know which color corresponds to the last island? Just seems like a really crappy thing to have in the "best puzzle" of the game.

The second problem is that it's just stupid. Gehn writes of a deeper connection between the 5ness that's everywhere and the 6ness that's supposedly everywhere but visibly just in a couple of places. You should see the shit I came up with to try and justify this. But what is the answer? There really isn't one. You just ignore one of six things and ta-da, you end up with five, which you can then easily match up to five other things. Why would they even write that in there and then just have it end up being so... inelegant.

Bonus bitchings/question about what happens after that!

Now, I might have just missed this, but what does Gehn even want with you, exactly? He has your book and he has you in a cage. Why should he let you leave? Why shouldn't he just kill you? If you trap yourself in the book prematurely, he has a native test it for him, so why is he insistent on you being the test subject this time?

So in short, after all the hype and everything, the whole ending was just a massive disappointment for me. In a way, it didn't even make sense. Why do people like this game so much?