Welcome, traveler. If you have found your way here, you are probably stuck. Please don't be embarrassed. I was stuck on the Selenitic Age for nearly three weeks in the winter of 1994, and I am the sort of person who does the crossword in pen.

This page is for people who want to get unstuck without having the game ruined for them. Nobody in my house would tell me the answers, and I'm grateful now, because the feeling when a puzzle finally gives way is the whole reason to play these games. So I've tried to give you the smallest push I can, and let you decide how much more you want.

One rule. If you e-mail me, I'll answer with a nudge first and wait to hear if you want more. A few people have been cross with me about this. I'm sorry, but it's for your own good, and they all wrote back later to say thank you.

A word about notebooks. Keep one. A real paper one, beside the keyboard. Both games are built around writing things down: numbers on walls, shapes in the sky, the sound a button makes. Almost every letter I get from someone stuck could have been answered by a notebook they didn't keep. My Riven notebook runs to thirty-one pages and has a coffee ring on the map of Survey Island.

About the librarian. My name is Delia Shapiro. I'm a night nurse in Portland, Oregon, and I played Myst for the first time on my husband's Macintosh the Christmas after it came out. We finished it together at two in the morning and then sat there not saying anything for a while, which is how you know a thing was good. Riven took me most of the spring of 1998, five discs and all. I've read the three novels too, and I'm hoping there's another game someday. If you know something, write and tell me.

Many thanks to the people who've written in with corrections, especially the gentleman in Manitoba who pointed out, very kindly, that I had the Channelwood elevator backwards for a month.

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to open this book since March 1998.

Last updated Saturday, September 11, 1999
Myst and Riven are the work of Cyan and the Miller brothers. I only take notes.