Riverside
Drew, Jeremy, and Vic (2008)
Riverside seems to be a serious mystery game, where you have to find out who murdered
your best friend. The game starts out a little slow, but quickly finds its pace. It's missing
a lot of scenery, but this could even be considered a stylistic device, allowing for scenes
to happen quickly and not bogging down the game. The USE command is implemented, but there
should be a number of alternate solutions that work for the puzzles it's used in, and the
guess-the-verb puzzle that's in there really bottlenecks the game. Then when things start to
look like you're getting close to the end of the mystery, it all abruptly crashes to a halt,
with some strange out of context message that makes no sense at all. I'm not sure why the
authors, there are three of them for this, would do something like that. It kills the game.
I mean, you might as well write something like, "we got tired of programming this, we want out
now, come up with your own ending, we're going to Bermuda." I feel a lot of people are going
to give this game a 1 for something like that. Under my scoring system I gave it a 4, and
that's probably too high. I can't recommend this one. It's really just a waste of time.