Rivage Review – A Time Loop Worth Experiencing
A charming puzzle game that's well worth your time.
Rivage is a first-person sci-fi puzzle game set aboard a seemingly empty space station in the future. You wake up with barely any context, and it’s up to you to piece the story together while exploring the space station. Your crew of talented fellow scientists is missing, you’ve lost all access rights, power supply to open doors is limited, and you need to escape. Oh, and the main character is stuck in a time loop all alone.
The time loop mechanic at the core of Rivage is interesting. Whenever you’ve run out of power or made the wrong moves, you can restart the day. This simple but initially barely explained mechanic adds a lot of gameplay and narrative depth to the game. Each of your loops has a purpose. Every successful loop where you make progress feels extremely rewarding, but each failed loop makes you feel just like Miranda (the main character) — stuck and alone. The space station becomes both your home and your prison as you familiarize yourself with it every loop.
This is because exploring the space station isn’t as simple as a casual walk. Every area you unlock requires you to earn the access rights one way or another as you solve various puzzles and tasks around the station. The difficulty of puzzles can range from relatively simple to knowing how to solve a Rubik’s Cube yourself. None of the main puzzles require you to pay attention to the tiniest details, but they do require you to focus on and think about what’s being presented in front of you and the things you’ve already seen. The ‘optional’ puzzles are much harder to figure out and are required to see the true ending.
I’m going to get my problems out of the way immediately. My only major problem would be the complete lack of guidance in certain sections with no options or hints to get around it. That, paired with a lot of unnecessary props, does make clicking around some areas feel tedious. You will manage to eventually figure out the solution, but sometimes it’s so simple and dependent on you noticing one specific piece of information that the feeling of satisfaction is not proportional to the time and effort you put in to find it. Other than that, there are a few logic puzzles that either need you as a player to know specific skills or just rely on trial and error until you get it right. The latter of which does not feel particularly good, only eliciting a strong “I’m glad that’s over.”
That being said, the puzzles are one of the primary attractions of Rivage, and overall, they’re very solid. The difficulty progression is reasonable, and the game gives you tools that let you take full advantage of the time loop mechanics to solve these puzzles. Your K-9 unit stores all the passwords, audio logs, and screenshots you take, so you don’t need to keep going back and repeating the same tasks over and over. If you enjoy logic puzzles, you’ll get your money’s worth because the puzzles themselves are satisfying, and each solved puzzle expands the space station for you.
The game has a lot of charm in several aspects. For one, it’s a very pretty game. The aesthetic is appropriately sci-fi, and the set designs and assets were clearly put together with a lot of care. There’s a very cohesive and lived-in feeling in the various rooms in Rivage that makes it feel like an actual place people existed in. This makes exploration and finding new areas even more immersive, as every new location gives you more context into how the characters lived before things went wrong. Presentation is one of the game’s strongest suits, and some of the visuals and soundtracks had me taking a pause just to appreciate them. It does an excellent job at show-not-tell, which a lot of narratives usually fail at.
The story is also surprisingly good, as they keep you on the hook with just enough information to keep learning more. You learn about your crewmates primarily through old texts, emails, recordings, and their rooms. This makes even the characters feel like jigsaw puzzles that you are slowly but surely putting together. Your initial opinions on all of them will most likely change through the course of the campaign as more depth is added to each of their characters. They are somewhat defined by the flaws that come with their immense talents, which makes them feel very human, and you end up feeling a fair amount of sympathy for the crew.
The game has a modest runtime of 12-15 hours depending on how long it takes you to solve some of the puzzles. Going for the true ending can extend this playtime by a few hours. I managed to beat the main story in 15 hours, and will definitely go back to chase the true ending. Throughout this, despite being a loop, the game does not get boring as it keeps throwing new puzzles your way without repeating older gimmicks.
Overall, I think $25 is a justifiable price tag for the experience. Even if that’s out of your price range, I highly recommend getting Rivage when it goes on sale. If you’re someone who loves puzzle games, Rivage is an easy recommend even at full price. It’s charming, atmospheric, and makes you want to solve and see more of this world. While it might not blow you away, it’s still an incredibly solid and enjoyable first game from an unknown studio that’s worth checking out.
Verdict
Rivage is a game that’s hard to criticize because it does almost everything correctly, but it doesn’t necessarily blow your socks off. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but there’s enough innovation and creativity that it carves its own unique identity. Immersion is one of the game’s strongest aspects, as the presentation is top-notch. The empty space station feels like a place where people actually lived, while the puzzles, exploration, and story are all tied to one another in a rewarding feedback loop that keeps you wanting to go on. Despite some rough edges with player guidance here and there, a puzzle game can be excused for it, and the 12-15 hour runtime justifies the price tag. Rivage is an excellent first game from Exnilo Studios, and I’m excited to see more from them.
Rivage
Rivage is a wonderfully atmospheric and immersive puzzle game with a unique time loop mechanic that sucks you into the world as you unravel the truth of what happened at the space station. While it might not blow you away, it's still an incredibly solid first game from an unknown studio.
Pros
- Great atmosphere, design, and presentation
- Puzzles are engaging and well thought out
- Story stays intriguing from start to finish
- Good pacing and variety keeps the game from becoming boring or repetitive
Cons
- 12 hours for the price might be a con for some
- Lack of save file system
A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review. Reviewed on PC.
