Rivage

The first half of Rivage is an enjoyable, if simple, puzzle game. After the halfway mark, the game devolves into relying on other, less engaging, puzzles. This shift is fairly stark, and led to a major decline in the enjoyment I felt from the experience. I should not need my smartphone to complete a game, nor is it good practice to scan unknown qr codes.

honestly the whole premise is cool but the way they went about the looping mechanic makes things tedious and drawn out. As if they knew the puzzles themselves weren't that interesting or great so they had to introduce a really dumb and slow cutscene to pad out time so you couldn't refund the game. i was proud the first five loops when i was slowly figuring things out but by loop 10 nothing seemed to fit and after looking up a hint or two found out that it relies on you knowing what comes next and it's a case of "well i need this so time to spend 5 loops to get it" felt like alot of wasted time just walking about.

I absolutely loved the game! The story, the character development, the soundtrack, the voice acting, and especially the art. I feel like many players might mistake the artwork for AI-generated content, but I believe it's far from that. My only issue is that the stretches between puzzles can be incredibly long. There were times when I simply couldn't keep playing because I needed to get some sleep, but by the next day, I had forgotten where I'd left off. Although K9 is an enormous help, it doesn't really give you any clues about where you last stopped. I think this could have been a great opportunity to make better use of that feature. Finally, I want to thank the developers for creating such an exciting game! I also really enjoyed the second ending. It left me with that lingering feeling of, "Wait, what happened to some of those clues?" What surprised me the most was that I actually had to learn how to solve a Rubik's Cube to progress, and even learn chess notation so I wouldn't easily forget the positions! Without a doubt, it was an incredibly enjoyable experience, and the effects were absolutely stunning! Thank you for such a memorable game!

Deja Vu

Enjoyable puzzle game. But the 2 endings are - lackluster at best. Not quite a "an then it was all a dream" pattern -but very close.

I would recommend this, but not without reservations. The game is more of an escape room than a puzzle game - though there are plenty of puzzles, and with good variety between them. A couple are frustrating, but most are okay/good. There's a bit of openness to the environment and the flow of the game, reminiscent *very slightly* of Outer Wilds, but don't go into this expecting OW. The time loop element of the game didn't come into play as much as I had hoped at first - but it did come into play *some*, and that was fun. Unfortunately the characters (with whom we interact only via logs and memories) tend to be really badly written, and the game features a remarkably bad pop culture depiction of autism that walked straight out of the 80s. Overall, I think there's enough enjoyment in the puzzles and the mystery that the game doesn't deserve a "don't play this", but the enjoyment definitely comes with a non-negligible number of speed bumps.