My experience with Riven was: great, beautiful, atmospheric, gorgeous, alien, hmmm, I liked the concept of entering on a book too, and people that create books that are passages to other dimensions, interesting.Okay, I'm hooked... let's play for reals, hmmm, wtf is this thing and what is used for? It looks like a cilinder and has 5 buttons that don't do anything, everytime I press a button, a sound is emitted that means something, right?... what I must do? I pulled this lever, okay, it had an effect somewhere in the island and I have no idea where or what it did, if it did something.
Finaly I solved the puzzle!Yay! What? An even more obtuse one?I must be retarded, I gonna check out a walkthrough... Wtf I just read... okay, you must have an autistic crazy mind to design that, I appretiated the effort but I could had more fun with other things. I loved the alien vibe that Riven had but I think that many times they gone way overboard with the absolutely no tips thing. When you look for hours to a thing that looks like a telescope, a giant metallic dildo or a space ship and you are not sure even what the damn thing is let alone solve the puzzle.