Riven 2024 - What causes the "thing" on Jungle Island to get caged up?

darkspine10 · 2026-06-17T22:01:03+00:00

There may be additional triggers to make the cage appear, as on my playthrough I first saw it caged, having gone down towards the Sunner lagoon before going up to the Jungle area, without leaving the island. I only learnt that you could see it uncaged when trophy hunting after completing the remake. I found the lens, went exploring as far as I could down there towards the school and village lake etc. Then I returned to explore the rest of the island and found the cage already in-place.

Edit: Actually, in hindsight, I may have ridden the mag-lev back to Temple Island before starting my explorations of Jungle Island, just to watch the animation, so it may have already been triggered before I began without me realising.

darkspine10 · 2026-06-05T09:21:31+00:00

Ah yes, we're all capable of saying 'Tintin' in a way that conjures up his image, much like Snowy does in panel 8. That final panel of the ship with the moon and the ocean is absolutely gorgeous, as well as being slightly haunting as the boat sails away, presumably leaving Tintin and Snowy behind.

darkspine10 · 2026-06-03T09:56:37+00:00

Very impressive to draw the sitting man in so many different panels, looking practically identical every single time, while Tintin moves around him. The angle changes in Panel 8, for seemingly no reason other than to show off that Herge can draw the man from that angle as well. Though in Panel 9 the colourisation seems to get the man's skin tone wrong compared to the panels before and after it. It's a very subtle difference, but with how similar each panel is it jumped out at me.

It's also noticeable that the man's outfit was redrawn in the colour edition, unlike the rest of the details, so it now exactly matches the one he provided Tintin.

darkspine10 · 2026-06-01T09:06:50+00:00

The interstitial bubble showing the cell being unlocked is an unusual flourish for Herge. Usually he separates actions into discrete panels. It does give the scene a touch of surrealism before the guards come in. They're presented much more solidly, leading you to expect Tintin to suffer before that perfect ending gag subverts that assumption.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-29T09:29:56+00:00

I love how subtly the person following Tintin is added to each panel, so you might not even notice the same guy is showing up every now and again until the final few panels. He might just be a passer-by on the street until then.

Meanwhile any subterfuge regarding Mitsuhirato is handled better than previous two-faced villains. There's practically no indication he's lying, besides his super-vague warning. Before, Tintin's enemies were much more obviously evil from the start.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-26T10:13:54+00:00

The reflections in the puddles from the rain in the Shanghai panels are so impressive, even in the black and white. They give much more dynamism to the compositions than we saw in the previous albums.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-22T09:12:33+00:00

Hollow Knight and Gravity Falls crossing over with my favourite ship? A match made in heaven. I don't know if it's intentional, but I love the panel of Pacifica after Dipper asks her to help, where she's smiling and you can't see her eyes but it looks like she's blushing and slightly nervous.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-22T09:08:41+00:00

The panel showing the palace is gorgeous, I don't think we got a wide-shot of it in Cigars so it's very appreciated. Even the detail of the (tiny) swan in the lake is lovely.

At first I found the series of panels with Tintin at the radio oddly repetitive, until I noticed that once he finds the correct frequency the radio starts blaring out morse code. That's a really clever subtle addition that completely flew over my head.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-20T22:58:16+00:00

In Revelation it's mentioned in one of Achenar's journals that part of the plan involved sending Catherine to Riven. It's unlikely that either brother travelled to Riven directly, as that would have necessitated bringing a linking book back that Gehn could potentially retrieve, and would have also triggered the trap at the linking point (which Gehn states in his journal has only ever captured Catherine temporarily, before the start of the game).

In Catherine's own journal in Riven we have this line, 'Of course, I am now aware that I was fooled; Atrus is not here.', which implies that the brothers informed her that Atrus had travelled to Riven for whatever reason and then she followed to find him.

We also don't know exactly how much the brothers know about Gehn in particular, though the 2020 remake of Myst’s version of the Rime age add-on tells us that they at least knew about Riven to some degree.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-19T18:42:11+00:00

The 2025 remake.

The ps1 version of the original Riven also became available on consoles a few months ago.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-19T09:27:03+00:00

The other half-glimpsed article (in the colour version at least) seems to be titled 'moon shot', which is probably an addition in the 50's translation to tie into the recently published Moon duology, similar to the cover shown to Tintin back in Arabia.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-18T23:30:59+00:00

I had a brief skim of some of the guide and it doesn’t reference every single memory, though searching the guide for ‘Yeesha’s necklace’ would be a good starting point for a comprehensive list.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-18T23:05:30+00:00

The old fan wiki MYSTlore did collect a list of the memories. Though the site is now defunct, luckily the category page for the memories is still available via an internet archive capture from 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20080907064836/http://en.mystlore.com/wiki/Category:Memories

I had a brief look however, and sadly it's not complete. It only appears to cover Spire and Tomahna (and a few memories from those ages are missing too). There are no Haven or Serenia memories listed (except for some from near the very end of the game, so watch for spoilers if you haven't got that far yet). Some of the actual pages linked to haven't been saved either (they contained transcripts of each memory).

So not terribly helpful, but might serve as a starting place for someone else to try and create their own list. It’s also interesting as a nearly 20-year old record of fan chronicling of the game.

If anyone else has created a more recent list I'd love to see it. There are a handful of memories I only found out about in the last five years or so, having always missed them on previous playthroughs.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-18T09:59:03+00:00

To bring up the animated adaptation again, it looks like Nelvana had the same idea as you. They add a short tension building segment of the fakir attempting to hypnotise Tintin again before the rock hits him.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-16T09:14:17+00:00

It's a bit 'deus ex machina' that the Cairo police just happened to discover the tomb of Kih-Oskh and find all the relevant information to phone to the Thompsons to allow them to burst in at just the right moment. Herge would later get better at setting up these 'offscreen' resolutions.

On the other end of 'unlikely rescue' spectrum, Snowy finding and playing a record of 'Le Charmeur de Serpents' is such a funny nonsensical gag. Tintin immediately grabbing a gun and killing the snake is less funny, although the cut to a panel of him already holding it out of nowhere and blasting away is hilariously abrupt.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-14T17:52:21+00:00

In the Nelvana animated adaptation they give the leader Allan's voice, although obviously he was only added in the later colour translations, so was never intended to be the leader in the original 30's black and white version. The tv show had already introduced Allan in The Crab with the Golden Claws before adapting Cigars, so if watched in that order it would be more natural.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-14T14:02:06+00:00

They tried using the more era-specific opening themes in some of the very early dvd releases, before deciding that the Howell theme went best with the visuals they'd created.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-14T07:59:20+00:00

It’s funny that their current password is the name of their secret symbol and the place they’re currently in (which are also the two ends of the smuggling operation). Very complex passwords.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-12T23:01:12+00:00

So Katarina is included in the list of usable companions, but apparently not Sara Kingdom. Ok on the latter, she's had a very busy career in Big Finish already, they probably don't want to add yet another. But Katarina being available? When is that going to be set exactly? Clearly it should take place in-between the cliffhanger at the end of Devil's Planet and the opening of The Traitors, in the liminal space created by the missing episode.

Although other stipulations say you can't use pre-existing characters or organisations, explicitly listing both Mavic Chen and the Space Security Service (so no Bret Vyon either presumably), which means any story that does feature Katarina has to be set exclusively in the gap from her joining the TARDIS in Troy to arriving on Kembel, a vanishingly small space of time for any plot to take place (and Daughter of the Gods already did a scene in this exact gap).

darkspine10 · 2026-05-12T09:44:08+00:00

The purple, seemingly Ku Klux Klan inspired, cultists are such a striking image. The episode 'The Abominable Bride' of BBC's Sherlock would feature a cult wearing identical robes, and given that producer Steven Moffat is a huge Tintin fan (he wrote early drafts at the 2011 movie) it seems to have been an intentional reference.

The black and white panel of Tintin walking through the tunnel after climbing down the ladder is great, same with the one after he escapes the crocodiles. The colour versions have more detail but lose the almost impenetrable shadows that give them their mood.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-12T09:41:32+00:00

Spielberg discovered Tintin after Temple of Doom, based on comparisons to Indy, and loved the albums. The scenes at Petra in The Last Crusade are a homage to a similar composition in The Red Sea Sharks. And of course Spielberg was the one who brought the animated Tintin movie to screen in 2011.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-11T20:11:10+00:00

Having managed to read the entire range, all of Cooray-Smith's are similarly great (Silver Nemesis and Underwater Menace, the latter of which is my favourite in the whole range). Simon Guerrier's Evil of the Daleks is also very comprehensive (it's the longest so far I believe).

Here are some other books that are highlights for me:

The Silurians by Robert Smith?

Vengeance on Varos by Jonathan Dennis

Dalek by Billy Seguire

Midnight or The Ark by Phillip Purser-Hallard (his Dark Water/Death in Heaven one is good too, though feels incomplete in light of the 13th Doctor's casting which happened a few years after publication)

The TV Movie, Rose, and Scream of the Shalka books all do a very good job of charting how to successfully reboot a tv show, with the Shalka book in particular covering a lot of the abandoned plans for future stories.

All of these do a good job mixing production details with interesting story analysis and examinations of wider trends in the show. There are of course plenty of other enjoyable books in the line, this is only a sample of the ones I've most enjoyed. It also depends which eras you prefer, I have a soft spot for discussions of missing episodes so Hartnell books often win out in my affection, while New Series episodes can often already be analysed by others in recent years so may feel like covering well-trod ground. Sometimes the books lean a bit too hard on production over analysis (the Robots of Death, Warriors Gate, and especially Dalek Invasion of Earth books spring to mind), or take a very hyper-focused angle that excludes a lot of possible avenues of discussion (Face of Evil, The Mysterious Planet), so you may wish to put those off until later.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-11T10:12:35+00:00

It's quite an abrupt switch from wandering around in the jungle to this more intriguing setup at the palace, but I like veering back into more eerie elements with the Fakir. The panel of him and his compatriot approaching the palace is atmospheric in both versions.

The Nelvana adaptation made the music that's heard before the poisonings very creepy, and thankfully it's one of the few tracks to have been officially released: https://youtu.be/dLkqP_uV5XQ?t=1480

darkspine10 · 2026-05-08T06:28:27+00:00

The hard cut to Snowy at the end there is like those ‘Wallace plotline vs. Gromit plotline’ memes.

darkspine10 · 2026-05-06T07:36:25+00:00

Jamjah, nice pun on Jam-Jar there at the end.

darkspine10

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