These instructions assume you have the game running.

Steam's version of Riven runs in the ScummVM emulator, which adapts it to run on a modern computer. One of the things the emulator does is attempt to scale up the original game's screen resolution to fit modern displays. This can result in the image flickering, especially during video/animations.

There are a number of settings that can be tweaked to control the graphics rendering.

Before anything else, make sure to save your game!


While the game is running press Ctrl-F5 on the keyboard. This will bring up the ScummVM menu:



Click Return to Launcher. This will show the main launcher menu:



The click Options to bring up the graphics settings:




Set the stretch mode to either "Fit to window" (this will scale it up but preserve the aspect ratio) or "Pixel-perfect scaling" (this will result in a smaller, but less pixelated image).

Uncheck "Aspect ratio correction" and "Filter graphics".

For graphics mode, both "HQ3x" and "OpenGL" give good results on my 2015 Retina-display Mac, but feel free to try out different options.

To test out how it looks after changing the settings, press "OK" to return to the launcher, then "Load" to load your saved game. If you don't like the way it looks you can follow the instructions in Accessing the settings again to go back and try something else.


Credit to the Why does my resolution plying Riven on Steam look bad. thread on Reddit for some of the information here.