The Rivers of Alice – Extended Version is a point and click adventure game. A genre which is uncommon now, but not impossible to find. I do, however, enjoy them from time to time. I’ll start with the obvious. The Rivers of Alice is an absolutely beautiful game. The hand drawn animations are, overall, very fluid. The watercolors blend with the music to create a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere. While we’re not talking Neverhood level animation, it’s still makes a hell of an impact.
Speaking of the music, it was provided by a Spanish band by the name of vetusta morla. The acoustic guitar music really adds to the experience, which is what games like this are best at. Even though wandering around can be frustrating, the score makes it feel better. The best part is that the soundtrack is online for your perusal, and it’s well worth it even if you don’t own the game. While the sound effects can be a little intrusive, especially at startup, they’re not obnoxious in the game proper.
The game overall has a very laid back feel. The puzzles are meant to be dream manifestations of Alice’s fears and sins (Sloth, oddly, being the most valuable to the player-more below). Due to the way the game is made, this doesn’t necessarily come across simply from playing the game. Most notably, there is no real voice acting and precious little text. Characters converse through the use of pictures; this essentially means that you could easily play this game in any language. All you’d need is to memorize which menu buttons did what; the smattering of hintbooks aren’t as useful as the game makes them out to be, and they’re often far more esoteric than the images characters share with you. They also tend to pop up after you already know how to solve a puzzle, or when you have already solved the puzzle in question.
Trust me when I say that this is one of the most helpful images I could drop into this review.
Speaking of the puzzles, they will certainly stretch that grey matter of yours. In classic adventure game style, you often need to figure out which object is necessary to fix a puzzle before you can solve it. They range from being as simple as (covertly) dumping more sand into an hourglass to give yourself more time to solve another puzzle, to solving a couple of classic (and, coincidentally, not fun) logic puzzles. The electrical box and the 3 stone discs standing out as sadly being the worst parts of the game. everything around them is novel, but they simply needed to exist. They just so happen to be at the exact middle and end of the game, respectively. The electrical box thankfully has the solution in game per Sloth, but the stone discs are not so forgiving. You’ll likely play with them until you brute force the solution by accident. No one really likes slider puzzles like the electrical box, and these two slightly mar what is otherwise a genuinely fun puzzle game.
This puzzle is the Devil…
…unless you have the answer. Thanks, Sloth!
I honestly feel the game is at its best when it does its own thing, building puzzles based around the environment. And much like the Lucasarts games of yore, it’s impossible to leave the game in an unwinnable state. There are only a few times you can get a non-standard game over; for the most part, they’re reasonable because they’re avoidable by observation. The exception is the tightrope walking segment. Trying to get Alice across that thing forced me to start over again from the beginning of the segment several times, each time more miffed than the last. Luckily, both the maze and the tightrope only need to be completed once; if you need to go back, it simply transports you to the other end without forcing you to do it again. The Mirrors always require you to figure out which is the true one, but that is easily done, and you’re unlikely to need to do it over and over again too many times. There were a few glitches as well; you can get stuck while trying to solve the building puzzle, luckily saving and reloading fixes the problem.
Alice shouldn’t become an acrobat. All I’m sayin’…
The Rivers of Alice – Extended Version is an exceptionally beautiful game. It’s abundantly clear that a large amount of thought and care was put into it. While I wish it was longer (and that the stupid disc puzzle wasn’t there), it sits at about the 4-6 hour mark, depending on how much the puzzles stump you. I can honestly say that I recommend it to lovers of these sorts of games.
Title: The Rivers of Alice – Extended Version
Developer: Delirium Studios, pequeño salto mortal
Publisher: Merge Games, Tagstar Games, Delirium Studios
Platform: PC
Price: $7.99
*We were provided a copy of this game for review*
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