Rivage review – saving the world, one puzzle at a time

Rivage – saving the world, one puzzle at a time (Raw Fury)

An indie sci-fi puzzle game attempts to offer a more laidback experience, when compared to the season’s more action-orientated blockbusters.

Puzzles have been around for as long as humans have known how to write, it’s just their delivery mechanism that changes. Up until fairly recently that was most likely to be a book or the back pages of a newspaper, the answers to each cryptic clue typically hidden on a different page or written upside down in small letters. Both of those systems are an open invitation to cheat.

In video games, puzzle solutions tend to be locked down, inaccessible to anyone cheekily looking for shortcuts. Naturally, with the arrival of the internet, cheating got a whole lot easier, but games remain easily the richest medium for puzzle solving. That’s because along with the conundrums themselves, developers can add deeper interactions, hidden clues, and build entire environments into which the puzzles are built, each solution forming a carefully concealed signpost to the next problem.

It’s the latter approach that first person puzzle game Rivage takes, putting you in the shoes of Miranda Vigneau, novelist and ship’s doctor aboard the A.R.E.S. space station, which has been sent to orbit a distant planet that may or may not hold the key to humanity’s future survival. Unfortunately, things have not gone to plan and at the start of the game you’re the last remaining crew member onboard, the other four having vanished in circumstances that are only gradually revealed.

Waking up at 9.32am on 1st May 2467, you begin taking stock of your surroundings. One of Miranda’s books is on the desk, while framed photos offer vague suggestions about her backstory. Look a little deeper though, and there’s plenty going on even before leaving your cabin. There’s a computer on the desk whose password you’ll need to guess, before reading emails and messages to get a sense of what’s going on.

There’s also a mysterious disc player, a large blank screen that needs to be fixed via a baffling multi-coloured fuse box next to it, and a locked safe. Wandering into the hallway outside, which is continually being scrubbed by a 25th century Roomba, you’ll find a chest with a reminder about how to reset the safe’s password, and suddenly you’re off looking for clues and sifting through materials that might be significant.

To catalogue your findings, Miranda has a handy neural interface that lets you take screenshots, store audio files, and scan keycards you happen across, automatically opening any doors you’re now authorised to access. That’s of particular importance because A.R.E.S. has a power problem. Opening doors and triggering certain actions uses a chunk of its extremely limited battery back-up, and once those charges are gone, the station is plunged into darkness.

Fortunately, at that point you find an old arcade machine in a room off the station’s kitchen. When you interact with it everything goes black and suddenly you’ve time looped back to 9.32am, with everything back the way it was – apart from the contents of your interface. That means all the details you’ve scanned in – including screenshots, keycards, voice recordings, and more – persist across multiple loops, so you don’t have to worry about re-entering passwords you’ve already figured out or having to dig out physical keys.

It’s a neatly designed system that suits the sci-fi setting while letting you get the most out of your exploration and deduction with minimum fuss. That’s just as well, because some of the puzzles are clearly designed with keyboard and mouse in mind. Having to guess a string of passwords is fiddly enough using a controller and onscreen keyboard, but one puzzle involves trying out different commands at a computer terminal.

Not all the puzzles are high-tech (Raw Fury)

It’s not the end of the world, and for the majority of the time the controls work just fine, the space station itself presenting a fascinating array of problems to unpick as you gradually earn access to more of its interior. Although sometimes cluttered, the spaces you explore are easy to navigate, with no need for jumping or dexterity, the meat of the game arriving in the form of the impressively varied puzzles you’re tasked with solving.

As you progress, you’ll discover more about what happened to your crewmates, through emails, messages, and voice notes. Usually finding characters’ audio recordings feels like a copout, but at least in Rivage the A.R.E.S. station was populated by scientists who needed to document their findings and setbacks as a matter of professional diligence, rather than as a lazily tacked on excuse for plot exposition. You soon find out that for a scientific expedition with such weighty responsibility, they certainly seemed to hold a lot of petty interpersonal grudges.

What really counts in a game like this is the quality of the puzzles, and in that regard Rivage excels, delivering numerous highly distinctive, mildly intellectual challenges – many of which require sourcing items or details built into the scenery that may have caught your eye during your travels. It is linear though, so you’ll need to work your way through its problems in strict order; getting stuck effectively stops you dead.

Still, nothing here is anywhere near as brutally challenging as fellow environmental puzzler The Witness, whose tests of mental acuity tended towards repetition and high difficulty. It gives Rivage a more casual appeal and means that while there are moments spent wondering what you’re supposed to be doing next, they’re normally swiftly resolved by the limited areas of the station you can reach at any given moment, helping direct you to the next hint.

The last hope for humanity trope might be well worn, but it’s only a backdrop to a diverse selection of mysteries that operate on a purely mechanical level, as you try to discover what happened to all those missing, emotionally overwrought colleagues. Rivage has a few rough edges but it’s an engrossing and neatly designed puzzle game, that offers a much more contemplative experience than some of this autumn’s more bombastic releases.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: TBA
Publisher: Raw Fury
Developer: Exnilo Studio
Release Date: 22nd September 2026
Age Rating: 16

It’s a very nicely decorated space station (Raw Fury)

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