Towards the end of 2025, I reviewed a game from Raw Fury called Routine. It is an excellent puzzle/immersive horror title, and I praised it for its gripping narrative, atmosphere and use of diegetic interactions to help ground us in the world. Well, almost a year later, Raw Fury are back with Rivage, and we’re looking at another incredible title that does a lot of what made Routine great, while increasing the workload on our grey matter. It can feel a bit overwhelming at points, but settle into its world and you’re in for one of the best immersive experiences this year.
We play as Miranda Vigneau, a doctor/therapist aboard the A.R.E.S. space station. Humanity has been forced to explore new planets for survival, and Miranda and a small crew have set off to explore the possibility of the planet Vesta as their next big hope. While aboard the ship, strange phenomena occur, and we wake as Miranda to find the crew missing, the ship in disrepair, and a trail of clues to follow to try and escape and figure out what happened.
It might not be the most original premise, but Rivage works wonders with the ideas in practice. Much like Routine, nothing in Rivage is spelt out for us. Story beats are discovered in notes or on PC’s, or in simply looking around the environment; each messy counter top or discarded item adding new twists to the who, what, and why of it all.
Interacting with Rivage is entirely set within the world too. There are no button prompts, waypoints, or tool tips to help. As we explore the initial room, it’s up to us to find what we can pick up, what holds questions, and where those answers will be. This isn’t the sort of game you can pick up for half hour at a time, or when you’re not in the headspace to really pay attention. Rivage demands we pay careful note to even the smallest details – like the product code on a bar of chocolate, or an off-hand mention of someone’s birthday in an email on a discarded tablet – and often we’ll have found the solution long before we find the puzzle, we just don’t know it yet.
Thankfully, it’s not entirely memory-based. Using her built-in K9 assistant, we can make notes, take screenshots, and log all found codes, audio entries, and more. Some are saved automatically – such as the code to our safe – while others need us to take a good, clear picture for later reference. It can initially feel overwhelming, but despite the complexity there is a definite flow to Rivage that means we’ve usually only got one or two key things to solve at a time.
All of this deduction is done within the realms of the game’s world, so there are no menu screens as such. It’s a very natural way to approach puzzles or simple things like opening doors or handles – just look at and grab what you’d expect to be able to, and chances are you can – and while this initially stumped me because I couldn’t see the big OPEN DOOR button that I needed to press, once again, once we settle into treating it as a real place, Rivage really absorbs us well into the setting and scenarios in front of us.
As we progress, we learn that part of the phenomena occurring is resulting in a time loop. As the station is damaged, the power runs out very quickly as we explore. Resetting the loop allows us to take the knowledge of the past and use it to get that bit further next time. Much like everything else in Rivage, this isn’t plainly spelt out for us. Rather, we discover it as we make slow but steady progress, and the revelation of looping opens up the station in a fantastically paced way.
As I mentioned though, this is not a game to come into half-assed. Skipping text or not listening to dialogue will halt progress, but so will not exploring fully, or skimming over seemingly innocuous messages. Everything here is there for a reason, and so we need our best detective hat on to get anywhere. Part of the reason this review is a while after launch is that I simply could not get into it with other busy things going on in real life, and I couldn’t concentrate on what I needed to do properly. But I’m very glad I got to it, as it is an impeccable example of developers placing the trust in the players hands, knowing that we don’t always need glowing icons or markers to show us the way. By letting us explore at our own pace, we can get fully invested in the world and the story, and each new discovery feels like a big accomplishment rather than another tick on a checklist of Things to Do.
Conclusion
Rivage requires willing on the part of the player to really get invested in the world, but let it sink its hook in you and it’ll be an immersive adventure that you won’t soon forget. Excellent stuff all round, and another notch in the already impressive bow of Raw Fury’s output.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
