When I try to imagine myself travelling into space, it makes me feel instantly claustrophobic and wildly anxious. Astronaut was certainly never on my ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ list. Now, if you dared me to imagine being in space only to find out I’m entirely alone, well, that’s a spiral I’m not sure I can return from. Yet, as I’m asked to embody Miranda Vigneau in Rivage, I have to do just that. In this twisted reality, I have to figure out why my whole crew is missing and how to get back home.
Miranda is one of five expeditionists on the ARES Space Station. Seven, if you want to include the station’s two robots. I awaken in my bed on Sunday 1st May 2467, completely alone. I take a gasp of breath like I’ve just woken from a terrible nightmare only to find I’m actually living in one.
The station has critically low power, which I’ll learn dwindles as soon as you try to open a door (of which there are many on ARES). And it’s this terrifying power balance that runs thickly and stressfully through the entire game. You’ll always need to consider how much you’ve got left, if you want to travel around the station unencumbered and without squinting nervously with your flashlight in the dark.
I’m told I need to understand what happened here and flee the station at all costs before it becomes my tomb. Just a light-hearted bit of puzzle-solving then. Evacuation though is far from easy. Like any good escape room, you won’t get out of the ARES station unless you solve a number of puzzles with, depending on your puzzly prowess, increasing difficulty.
But, when I’ve completed escape rooms before, I’ve never done it alone. To me, it has always been a fun activity to do with friends, testing your brains and sometimes your friendships when you have a little squabble about a particularly bewildering brainteaser. Without friends, playing Rivage was one of the loneliest experiences I’ve ever had in a game. It was also the hardest escape room attempt ever.
Not only was I, by design, forced to be the only crew member on the entire station, but I was also forced to complete puzzles with just my brain as a helpful aide. And let me tell you, I’ve never felt such a concoction of clueless and smart in such quick spinning succession.
As soon as I stepped out of my bunk, I was immediately on the lookout for clues. Overturning books and rotating them for clues, taking in every little thing about my room to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. And before I’d even stepped foot outside of the door, there were already a myriad of puzzles I knew I needed to solve, but in what order remained entirely unclear.
One thing was certain though, I was equipped with a personal neural interface that was going to be my guiding light and in-built storage container throughout this whole experience. The K9 is a very clever companion, decorating my screen with everything I’m collecting from screenshots, audio, videos, passwords, ID cards, upgrades and more. And you’ll need it too because in Rivage, there’s an overwhelming amount of data you’re required to absorb.
As I mentioned, the power runs out and this will result in infuriating dead ends. But, developers Exnilon Studio has a bigger vision for this puzzle game. For Rivage, you’ll need a way to reset everything and that’s when the perpetual time loop comes in. You’ll find the way into a loop early doors and it’ll become your haunting friend, enabling you to take things from the top, even if it’s incredibly frustrating at times to do so.
And while at first all it feels like all you’re doing is uncovering puzzles, you’ll soon begin to start solving them. As pieces of the puzzle start to click into place, there’s that addictive dopamine release that’ll carry you through the entire game. But, there’s also the dreaded imposter syndrome. Some puzzles in Rivage are incredibly hard. While some are logic-based, join-the-dots, figure out the formula and put it into action, there’s some that’ll have you questioning your sanity. Especially, since you’ll already be questioning your sanity in a spaceship with no friends.
I don’t want to give the game away, but there’s one particular puzzle that’ll ask you to solve an iconic 70s kids’ toy. I didn’t imagine I’d be watching a 10-minute YouTube video on how to solve it because I’ve literally never tried in my life, but here we are. At this point, I almost quit. Almost being the operative word. I love puzzles, but I knew what this one wanted me to do and I didn’t think I had it in me to do it, especially because it proved much harder without the physical entity in my hand, rotating it in the game to try and make it make sense.
At times, puzzles like these were incredibly frustrating. Other times, they were astonishing and exciting. But, overarching all of this, I have to say I cannot believe the sheer amount of puzzles that Rivage has managed to encapsulate into one space station and one truly ambitious title. It almost feels a disservice to compare it to an escape room because escape rooms could never achieve the scale of what’s been done here by Exnilo Studio.
And I’m not even sure I can say the puzzles are the best part about Rivage either. That moniker has to go to the setting in which you complete all this brain-testing, which is positively breathtaking. Exnilo Studio wanted to create an immersive world and it truly feels like something straight cinematic.
At times I felt myself comparing it to 2016’s Passengers (that one where JLaw and Chris Pratt find themselves the only ones awake on a passenger ship with 90 years left of their journey). At least they had each other, eh? Though you wouldn’t be saying that if you’ve actually seen it. Turns out, I’m actually alright with being alone on ARES after all.
The sci-fi setting is an excellent choice. Yes, I may be inclined to say this because I’m actually a massive fan of sci-fi, littering my days with quiet moments alone with books from VanderMeer to Weir, or watching (and rewatching) Moon and the OG Total Recall. I even made an Audible podcast about Exoplanets once. I digress. Despite my love of sci-fi, it’s a setting that will undoubtedly be appreciated by any good puzzle-solver.
Whilst the station appears clean and simplistic to begin with, I found myself hours deep into the game thinking about just how much mystery had emerged from its seams. And all of this is made possible by the futuristic web of mystery. But, as you solve the game’s many puzzles, you’re also invited to unravel the tale behind it all. After all, the puzzles are the key to a much bigger picture. Through audio logs, videos, emails and messages you’ll slowly uncover the relationships between the crewmates and, more importantly, the changing mental state of them all as the days ticked by on ARES.
Miranda is the ship’s doctor, psychiatrist, and guiding light. Yet, she’s the one who finds herself stuck in the timeloop entirely alone. It weaves an intricate tale that needs your attention. Fortunately, I found myself paying attention so intently so as not to miss any parts of the puzzle that I was focusing more than I normally would on the narrative. It paints a picture of the group (or family) that Miranda once had aboard this station. She was once so eager to get here and now she’s desperately trying to find a way out. She’s a pretty big deal, fronting magazines and publishing books, yet she finds herself floating in space for who knows how long.
But she’s smart and so are you. Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself as I worked my way through Rivage’s many perplexing puzzles. Akin to their setting, the puzzles are also scientific in nature and for some, that may be a tipping point. It certainly felt like that for me as I quivered in the corner with my low-grade science GCSE and a brain that goes, “Science? Oh god, not science”. There’s bits of code to solve, conversations about gravitational pull and connecting data points on a perplexing solar system of stars and planets. Fear not though, you’ll also have to just do things like using a vending machine because it’s important to the plot and for the greater good.
Like any great puzzler, it really did have me questioning my sanity as I spent hours trying to figure out exactly what I was supposed to do. The danger of the timeloop though is that you can reset your hard work with one bad decision and that adds a sense of jeopardy to this game that I really wasn’t expecting. Like the ARES station crewmates, at times I was feeling isolated, claustrophobic and a little bit mad. But, it also gave me a real sense of achievement.
Rivage is accessible to anyone who wants to get utterly lost and then bathe in the glory of figuring out how to find your way back. I can only commend Exnilon Studio on what must have been a total headache to try and create as they’ve woven an astonishing amount of puzzles into one title. It certainly gave me a bit of a headache at times. But, overarching all this, it was deeply enjoyable, incredibly satisfying, and wildly clever. I only wish I was as clever as its creators.
