When I played through Riven a few years back I played on the 1 dvd version and it was such an unstable janky port that it was hard to really enjoy the game. I am pretty sure I legit had approaching forty or so crashes during my time with the game and it made dealing with certain parts of the game outright hostile and painful.
That said I think some people either had great luck with stumbling upon things or forgot the parts where it doesn’t work well at all. I recall getting to a point where there was only one way forward by dealing with a circular room with a ton of symbols all around its periphery. Without getting into specifics there are things around the game world that let you know which symbols are important… except one of them is located in a single screen off the beaten path that didn’t appear to be highlighted or indicated to exist unless you randomly clicked on part of a single random screen that would take you there.
I struggled on this puzzle for hours, going over every single screen in the game multiple times trying to figure out what the hell I was missing (even doing this I never found the one random off the path place that had the thing I was looking for). I eventually cracked and looked up online what the hell I was supposed to do as I literally could do nothing else in the game until I got past that puzzle and that awfully set up side screen on top of all the crashes just broke the game for me. Whenever I hit the smallest bit of struggle I just pulled up a walkthrough and skipped past it (TBF this is my long-standing point & click adventure strategy), rushed my way through and was glad to be free of it. Part of that is due to the shoddy port, but when the design in that game fails it fails hard.
When I think back on it I initially remember all the good bits of world building and the like, but really I think it is perhaps the best example of a game that is much better in retrospect than in the moment. Vote for it or don’t, but maybe don’t go revisit it.