Guides · The story

The riven land

Riventale means "the riven land": the tale of what was torn. The game never tells its story outright. It comes in pieces: the wordless opening of every new world, the titles the bosses carry, the ruins themselves, and sixteen Torn Pages scattered through the world.

Torn Page I, Whoever Finds This, open on parchment: “I woke where you woke, in the quiet middle of the land, with nothing but my hands.”

The Crystal

Riventale was once whole. At its heart floated a crystal that held the four elements as one, Water, Fire, Earth and Wind, with a white light at its core. The land around it was calm. The Riventale crest shows that crystal: four elements round a white core.

The Vael

The Vael were makers who lived in the east, under a sky that was still clear. They built thinking robots of tungsten that walked and worked and never slept. They cut moonstones that could carry a traveller from one end of the land to the other, and ground lenses so fine they could see through stone, then through the sky, then through the world itself. In Page III one of them writes: "There is nothing in this world we cannot understand, given time."

You can still hold their work in your hands. Tungsten calms the robots that wander their ruins because it is their makers' metal. Moonstone orbs still carry you across the land. And the robots still go about the wastes without masters, because no one told them to stop.

Varn, the Last Artificer

The Vael council called their greatest maker the Artificer. His name was Varn, and he called himself curious. Several pages are his own notes: confident at first, then careful, then something else. He designed the Elemental Core, an engine set beneath the Crystal to draw a thread of its light down into the Vael city, "and we will never be cold or hungry or small again." He checked the bindings eleven times.

The Riving

When Varn lit the Core, the Crystal answered. A Vael child describes the moment in Page VIII: the sky went white "like the inside of a bell", and the four colours tore apart in the air. The elements fled into four wild lands, folded away where no map reaches. The blast burned the Vael homeland into the smoking wasteland now called the Robotic World, where giant robots lie where they fell. The Vael were gone. That night is called the Riving.

The binders and the Keepers

The elements were loose, tearing at the seams of the world, so the last of the Vael chained them, one in each of four temples, with four crystal towers to hold each chain. The chained elements became the Keepers. A chain-binder writes: "It is not mercy and it is not punishment. It is a door held shut." The towers still feed the chains, and the chains pull a fallen Keeper back: that is why each one rises again in its temple.

Each Keeper has its own moves and a second phase when it is badly hurt, and each guards an elemental ore. How they fight is in the Keepers guide. Where the temples are, and how to reach them, is for you to find.

The Robot Titan

One engine was left standing on purpose. The Robot Titan, the Last Engine of the Vael, would not stop guarding the altars in the burned wastes, so it was left to guard them. Its body is obitite, ore that went black in the Riving and never warmed again: "the metal of the dead".

Rivet

Rivet is a small Vael scout robot with one big glowing lens for an eye, the last Vael machine still awake. He narrates the opening scene of every new world and, if you ask for help with I'm new, teaches you the basics. He speaks in short, dry sentences, knows more than he says, and is glad of the company. Page IX explains why he is still switched on.

You, the Wanderer

You wake in the calm middle lands and find the first torn page. From there the path runs from Wanderer to Adventurer to Champion: through the wastes where the Titan keeps its watch, into the four hidden lands, and down to the engine that broke the world.

The sixteen Torn Pages

The pages are written by four voices: an unknown wanderer who woke where you woke, a Vael child, Varn, and a temple chain-binder. Each part of the world holds its own part of the story:

Pages	Found in	What they cover
I to V	Chests in cabins, desert temples, igloos and dungeons in the middle lands	The calm world, the Crystal, the Vael, rumours of the east
VI to X	Ruins and giant robot remains in the Robotic World	The Core, the night before, the Riving, the Titan
XI to XV	The chests in the four Keeper temples	The binding, and how each Keeper came to be
XVI	Left by the Elemental Core when it falls	Varn's last page

A chest offers the lowest-numbered page of its place that you have not found yet, so the story arrives roughly in order, and the first chest you open in the middle lands always holds Page I. Pages count for each player separately.

Reading and keeping them

Right click a page (tap it on a touch screen) to read it on parchment.
The Journal (J, or the pause menu) keeps every page you have found in its Torn Pages tab, beside a list of all sixteen, so you can reread them after the item is gone.
Finding all sixteen earns the achievement The Whole Tale, and the aura of the same name.
The Journal's Story tab replays the opening scene in single player.

What the pages do not say

They never give directions. The way into the hidden lands is not written down anywhere in the game, though Page V describes a child holding a lens up to the light and seeing "something behind the world, folded small and full of colour". What happened to Varn after the Riving, and what the last page means, the game leaves to you. The opening scene ends on one line that the whole story leans toward: "What was broken can be made whole."

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