Rivage review – A sci-fi narrative puzzler that wants to challenge you

Rivage contains one of my favourite narrative puzzle game tropes: the abandoned space station. Fort Solis, Deliver Us Mars; it’s an unsung genre of game that, for whatever reason, I just can’t get enough of. Unlike many, though, Rivage isn’t horror. You’re alone on a space station, sure, but you don’t need to worry about coming across otherworldly horrors or even dead bodies. Instead, Rivage is all about the puzzles.

Oh, the puzzles. I love a good puzzle game, and so in numerous ways, Rivage was made for me. If you’re not solving a puzzle, you’re making your way to the next puzzle, or puzzling over what the next puzzle is going to be. It isn’t an easy game by any means, though, and I’ve come up against a brick wall many times throughout the dozen or so hours I’ve spent with it. With no hint system available, you’re left to simply scratch your head and repeatedly trace your own footsteps to find something you’ve previously overlooked. But it does mean that when you do solve something, Rivage feels incredibly rewarding.

Set 400 years into the future, Rivage casts you as Miranda, a medic on board ARES, a space station with a crew tasked with studying the planet Vesta, analysing how capable it is to support human life. But Miranda is not only alone on ARES, she’s also stuck in a time loop. Over the course of your time with the game, then, you’ll uncover what happened onboard ARES as you work towards escaping not only the space station, but the time loop you’ve found yourself stuck in as well.

I can’t quite decide if the time loop mechanic is a mere gimmick or actually a worthwhile mechanic. By interacting with a peculiar arcade cabinet in a storage room, Miranda can force a new loop at any time. But not all is lost when she restarts her day; any data she’s uncovered and recorded to her personal K9 device – an AR tool that can hold digital keys, passwords, recordings and more – stay with her. But anything else, such as objects she’s picked up, will be reset.

There’s a problem with ARES’ power supply, which means in each loop, it’s finite. Opening a door costs a unit of power, and so after opening four doors, the power will go out. Miranda can do some stuff in the dark, and she’s got a torch which helps, but it means looking on computers or operating certain machinery is out of bounds. And so your only option is to start a new loop.

There seems to be no limit on how many loops you can live through in Rivage. There’s an achievement for completing the game in 25 loops or less, but you’re free to restart whenever you want with no penalties in the game. It can become a bit of a chore, especially when you need to do things in a certain order and you might need to reset simply because you’ve gone through the wrong door. But the way it forces you to choose where to go and think about each room you enter in a careful, measured way is rather clever.

Figuring out where to go isn’t always clear, though, which means sometimes you do need to wander aimlessly until you pick up a new thread to follow. It’s easy to miss something – like a password hint to unlock a door – that you won’t spot until you’ve scoured the space station for the nth time. And while that’s the nature of puzzle games of this type – you need to pay attention to everything – it would be nice to have a way to get a hint, or even track your current progress. As it is, it’s the type of game that will hugely benefit from you playing with a notebook and pen at the side of you.

Miranda’s K9 will come in handy, too, as you can take in-game screenshots of anything at any time, and they can be brought up as part of your heads-up display. These also carry between loops, so if you see something interesting that you feel might be a solution to a puzzle, it’s worth snapping a picture of it. Being the type of person who likes to make notes, though, I’d also recommend jotting it down too.

There’s a lot I love about Rivage. As annoying as the lack of a hint can be, I do appreciate how it trusts you, the player, to figure things out for yourself. It doesn’t hold your hand or make any attempt to guide you, and other than the odd “it looks like I can put something here” type of comment, Miranda doesn’t bore you with an endless monologue addressing the things she’s doing and why.

It also looks incredible. Sure, the areas you explore here are pretty hemmed in, but they’re packed with exquisite detail. Books, food packets, notes, drawings and more can all be picked up and examined – sometimes just for some world flavouring, but also to aid in solving puzzles. That’s the beauty here. Something that doesn’t seem useful to begin with might actually have an important meaning later on, so it pays to be vigilant of everything.

There are a few issues that do mar the experience somewhat, however. When you’re engaging with a computer screen, for example, you can’t simply lock onto the screen to move a cursor around it; you’ll control movement the same way you do as you move around, so it can be hard to accurately click on certain things or get a good view while reading. And if your K9 is visible on your screen (on PS5, you can toggle the overlay on and off with the touchpad), buttons will simultaneously control your K9 and your movements, which can become irritating, particularly if you need your K9 in view to reference a screenshot you’ve taken, for example.

But given the depth and beauty of Rivage, and the immersive experience it offers, these problems are easy to overlook – as long as you’re up for a challenge. To fully enjoy Rivage, you’ll need to have a lot of patience and have the type of analytical brain that thrives in puzzle solving. If you’ve struggled with narrative puzzle games in the past, I think it’s fair to say that Rivage is going to be a challenge.