Rivage is a time loop puzzle game where something's gone terribly wrong, power's at a premium, and your salvation's a mysterious arcade machine

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One of my (not entirely unreasonable) fears is waking up on a spaceship alone, drifting in a great void that wants to kill you if it's given even the slightest chance. I'm glad I never have to experience that, let alone over and over again on loop.

Such is the fate of one Miranda Vigneau in Rivage, who awakes aboard the A.R.E.S. space station above the promising planetary candidate VESTA—her crew's gone, and the station itself is acting weird, though this being a sci-fi mystery, there'll be plenty of ominous logs strewn around the place to help you piece things together.

Assisting you is something called the "K9 system", which means you can lock in certain puzzle solutions so you don't go mad solving them over and over. Probably a vital bit of systems architecture in a game like this.

You'll still need to loop, though, because the station only has so much power in it—the thing that kills you in Rivage isn't some horrid alien or biological parasite, but space itself. Basically, power's the ticking time bomb that'll bring your present run to an end—though Miranda doesn't get spaced or anything.

Instead, you head on over to a mysterious arcade machine to kick the loop off all over again when the lights go out. In other words, Rivage seems to be angling itself as less of a horror game ala Alien: Isolation or an existential dread/hope simulator like Outer Wilds, and more of a sci-fi mystery with some interpersonal character development via your absentee crew.

Rivage promises to bend your brain with puzzles that hinge on "gravity, magnetism, and the very flow of time"—which, if you like cracking open a good mystery, sounds a treat. It plans to release August 13 this year, though you can play a demo on Steam and take a crack at Miranda's puzzle predicament for yourself.