PC, free
Video games are such an excellent means of delivering short stories, and yet I feel so under-used for the format. Brevity of narrative is often padded with a swollen amount of game, or small ideas are delivered in an overwhelming number of words. So let’s celebrate The River for fully realising the notion. This is a short tale, set in a beautifully drawn black-and-white world with fantastic music, that has no pretentions beyond delivering its brief story.
The River is very deliberately ambiguous in what it’s about as it begins. One thing’s for certain: the person we control is dead. So dead, in fact, that it has no memory of who it is, such that it’s rendered as a white blob.
There’s no good genre title for something like this. “Visual novel” is perhaps the closest we have, but as much as this is on me, that classification always makes me think of a manga-drawn dating sim dubiously set in a high school. This is none of those things. It’s also not a “walking sim”, the other term used for games which offer less agency to the the player, given it plays out as a 2D point-and-click adventure. So let’s call The River a “digital short story”, and all be OK with that. Hooray, we’re all OK with that!
You are told, by a female figure, that you need to interact with other people in this unexplained void-like place, and in doing so, you find yourself sent back into a brief memory of theirs. In doing so, you piece together a moment in time for a small town, perhaps in some feudal era.
As I say, your role in this tale is to move the story on. You’re metaphorically turning the pages, but I argue that when it comes to gaming, it’s somehow a more meaningful act than something so specifically mechanical. I’m not ludologist, and I’d be fascinated to read studies exploring the phenomenological differences between being the means by which an animated, visual and auditory experience moves forward, and the purely rote action of turning a page. But I’m convinced it’s different.
As for the story itself, I found myself very intrigued, and I’d argue even more so for having guessed where it was going long before it got there. But I won’t say any more.
In fact, I won’t add anything more at all. I don’t need to worry about justifying your pennies, as the game is free. Just get it, play it, and have experienced something new.
- bokchoi
- Steam
- Free
- Official Site
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