The River
bokchoi · 2025 · Adventure, Singleplayer, Visual Novel, Interactive Fiction, 2D
PC
Very Positive92% · 64
This game is free to play. Get it on Steam →
Screenshots
About The River
You wake up in the void, with no memory other than the deep sense that something horrible has happened to you in life that has left you in limbo. Can you find your way back to the living to make things right?Should you?Welcome to my first visual novel / game project, The River. I actually made something!This is my very first attempt at making a game, as well as my first second earnest attempt at a cohesive, stand-alone narrative.I set off to create all of the visual assets, sound effects, and music myself, and scripting/tying it all together with Adventure Game Studio.Estimated play time: 30-50 minutes.Playing with good Audio / Headphones is highly recommended.Content Warning: Contains mature subject matter (discussion of death and dying, written descriptions of violence)Game Features:
- Unique, (mostly) monochrome style visuals
- Digital hand-drawn backgrounds
- Unique soundtrack and dynamic music score for each of the game's 12 scenes
- Nearly 2000 frames of sprite animation
- Visual Novel styled story, including dialog and character portraits
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Short VN. Easy Achievements, 100% / ~12min.1 found this helpful
I met bokchoi at a convention, and my first impression of his illustrations were how great his art looks while working with an extremely limited color palette! We talked about game dev and The River, I’m very glad I played, nice discovery. Landscapes, characters portraits and their animations were great! Loved the door animation too. I was immersed immediately, it’s a great game to just disconnect for an hour and play something simple to relax. Wish I could have paid for the game :)
Artsyle looks ok but having things move accross the screen makes it look jaring and gave me motion sickness. Story was quite predictable from the moment you meet the young girl. Not interactive enough for me to call this a game.
THE ABSOLUTE EMOTIONAL PEAK!!!!! thanks for developing this game as i found emotions i didnt know i had!
Beautiful storytelling, art, music, everything
This isn't a game. It is a digital e-book/visual novel masquerading as a game on Steam. There isn't any actual gameplay here, just clicking through some of the worst writing to insult the concept of literature. This is the kind of writing that would never be accepted by a real book publisher, leading to this being dumped onto Steam Direct for $100 as if it was a game... it's not. This point + click e-book is presented with garbage monochrome pixelcrap "art" (ugh) and of course the book plot and subject... yes, you guessed it, this is a high school anime club dropout fan-fiction about the author and his imaginary girlfriend experiencing the afterlife, because what could be more cringey? Visual novels/e-books are the worst way to try read a book (and they're always written far worse than real books too). Imagine reading your favorite book, be that War and Peace or The Davinci Code (are you ok??), but you have to click the mouse for every single sentence that appears. You'd hate it. It's a garbage way to try read a book... and even if it wasn't, this still isn't a game. Now take that annoying clicking and add utterly cringey high-school anime club dropout writing to it. Real author…
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