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by David Welbourn

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Riverside

by Jeremy Crockett and Victor Janmey

2008

(based on 16 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

In this incomplete mystery, you play as a man named Mike who feels obligated to investigate the murder of his psychiatrist friend John. CAUTION: Contains read-authors'-minds issues and an abrupt troll ending.


Game Details


Awards

31st Place - 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2008)

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Number of Reviews: 2
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting slice of life with game stopping bug , April 20, 2016

Thus is a fairly short game about a friend who died and their funeral. As you begin to remember more about them, the plot thickens.

The writing is descriptive and pleasant. Unfortunately, there is a bug with the album which prevents you from winning. Otherwise, an intriguing slice of life.

Edit: Okay, I found another review online that says "Read Album" is the correct move. The game ends in a shockingly stupid troll message, and gives you a new verb to get two other dumb endings.

I agree with one reviewer's hypothesis that the author couldn't finish it in time and made a troll game.

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Incomplete Game, November 3, 2008
by WriterBob (Richmond Hill, Ontario)

“Riverside” is a traditional Inform text adventure. I am in favour of games that are written in the more standard text adventure formats: Inform, TADs, Glulx.

The plot development of this game is cumbersome. It starts with a bit of a teaser. If you don’t successfully find the correct response that the game is looking for in this teaser, you will lose the game before it even gets going. Like other games this turned into a situation of guessing what the implementer was thinking. This is a difficult line to walk.

There is an instance where a character leaves the room during a conversation. I try to follow the person. The game does not recognize the word, “follow.” I explicitly go the direction the character went. The game then says that I should try talking to the character. I talk to the character and the narrative says that I follow the character into the room I just tried entering. This is very clumsy.

The conversation interface is limited to “Talk to,” a character. There is no real dialogue. This is a step back from the menu driven conversation system. The prose is limp and lifeless, but it is functional.

I feel as if the game is on rails, very linear without much freedom to explore the environment. Even when there are times to explore the environment, the items examined are meaningless to the story line.

If the game is on rails, the train has just crashed. Even using the walk through there is no way to get past a critical step in the plot. The contest version of this game cannot be completed.

In summary, the communication methods are lacking, the plot is painfully linear, the prose is uninspired, and the game itself is unplayable.

Even if it were to be completed and put in a playable state, Riverside is not compelling enough to complete.

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Riverside on IFDB

Recommended Lists

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My new walkthroughs for March 2019 by David Welbourn
On Monday, March 26, 2019, I published new walkthroughs for the games listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Riverside:

Brilliant trolling games by Not Troll
Some games are just that bad, some are so bad it's good, and a few are obviously trolling. Yet, are there games that troll so much that they start to be brilliant? Or even those that seems to be trolling that turn out to be brilliant...

Games with faceplants/heel turns at the very end by Andrew Schultz
I'm looking for--well, anything that does this. Not "you are missing 4 of 5 pieces of the magic sword," but more, it could either be something funny to notice if you really think about it, or it could be something more obviously...




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