Getting Started with Rivage

Rivage puts you in the visor of Miranda Vigneau, a researcher who wakes alone on the A.R.E.S. station (also written Ares) on May 1, 2467. Planet VESTA hangs outside the circular cabin window. The rest of the crew is gone. Exnilo Studio in Montreal built the game as a two-person project; Raw Fury publishes it. The campaign launches on September 22, 2026 for PC on Steam (app 4094660), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and the Microsoft Store with Xbox Play Anywhere. It is a first-person sci-fi puzzle adventure, single-player only, with no microtransactions.

Your first hour is not a combat tutorial. It is a lesson in how the station spends electricity. Loops end when POWER runs out, not when Miranda dies. Every door you open and every system you boot is a withdrawal from a shared battery. The time-loop guide is the systems manual; this page is the packing list so you do not walk into that loop blind.

What you are actually learning

A.R.E.S. was sent to study whether VESTA could become a new home for a 25th-century humanity that has already left the solar system. A space-time anomaly trapped the station. You are not hunting a monster through the corridors. You are reading what Dahia, Johnny, Aman, and Rafi left on desks, in lockers, and in half-finished meals, then using those scraps to repair machines that no longer obey ordinary physics.

Puzzles sit inside the architecture: gravity, magnetism, time, physical boards, emails, safes, batteries, keycards, audio logs, color panels, cubes, a pharmacy that runs on spare cells, a pod bay, and crew lockers. Treat each solved step as a permanent efficiency gain. The K9 implant is how Miranda keeps those gains. It logs discoveries, stores screenshots, remembers puzzle solutions, and provides the flashlight when light intensity drops. Floor items reset. K9 does not.

If you still have the Steam demo on disk, play it as a dedicated path rather than as a spoiler reel for the finished game. Exnilo pulled the public demo after moving launch from August 13 to September 22. Local copies still run. Saves do not carry over. The demo page lists those limits; the first-hour walkthrough is the room order if you want a route.

Rivage gameplay trailer | PS5

Platforms, languages, and setup

• PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Microsoft Store (Xbox Play Anywhere).
• Engine: Unreal Engine 5.7.4.
• Full controller support on every platform. DualSense haptics on PS5. See controls before you assume a bind.
• Steam Cloud, Achievements, and Family Sharing on PC.
• English voice and UI. French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese ship as UI and subtitles. This wiki localizes English, French, German, and Spanish pages.

Confirm your machine against the system requirements. Steam lists a minimum of Windows 10, Intel Core i5-9400F or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16 GB of RAM, NVIDIA GTX 1070 Ti or AMD RX Vega 56, DirectX 12, and 12 GB of space. Recommended is Windows 11, i5-11400F or Ryzen 5 5600X, 32 GB of RAM, and an RTX 3060 12 GB or RX 6700 XT. The station’s lighting and interior clutter are the show; give the GPU headroom if you care about reading labels on a wall from across a corridor.

First-session plan (about one loop)

1. Wake in Miranda’s quarters and look before you sprint. The date, the K9 reset message, and the missing-crew alert are not flavor text. They tell you what kind of game this is.
2. Open the computer. Emails hide the birthday/password reset (type K, then 000, then the birthday you find in the room). Bank every code in K9 the moment it works.
3. The cabin safe uses the word Stardust, tied to Miranda’s book. Screenshot the relevant note so you never retype from memory under low light.
4. Step into the crew corridor only after you know which doors are cosmetic and which eat power. The loop planner is built for this kind of choice.
5. Kitchen, astro lab cube, kitchen anomaly, and dock system are the demo’s first cluster. Do not chain them if your power bar is already thin; one extra room can strand you before Time Trickster is even in reach.
6. When the grid dies, use the K9 flashlight, finish any battery you are already carrying, then take the arcade reset. Knowledge stays. The object in your hand does not.

You can hold one item at a time in the demo path. That rule turns the emergency pharmacy into a logistics puzzle rather than a fetch quest. Johnny’s note about three batteries is a route, not a scavenger hunt you improvise while the lights fade.

How to think, not just where to walk

Rivage is closer to a station mystery than a horror gauntlet. PC coverage has compared the mood to interpersonal sci-fi rather than a creature feature. That matters for your first session: you will miss more by rushing past a sticky note than by failing a cube. Take screenshots of whiteboards, barcodes, plant names, and locker glyphs. If a door is a higher keycard level than you own, leave it. Level-two and level-four readers in the lobby are not invitations; they are a map of later loops.

Read Miranda’s page once you have her emails. She is not a silent visor. The book on the shelf, the password recovery, and the locker to-do list all belong to a person who expected a normal research day. The rest of the guides hub exists to keep that day from turning into a power blackout you did not budget.

Wishlist the Steam page and watch the release date plus news if you are waiting for September 22. Official site, Discord, and @RivageTheGame are collected on links. There is nothing to grind, no shop, and no reason to treat the first loop as a speedrun unless you already know the pharmacy route.

Common first-hour mistakes

• Treating the loop like a death: you did not fail when the lights died. You ran out of budget. Review which rooms you opened and cut one next time.
• Ignoring K9 until the second loop: the implant is available from the opening. Screenshots of the birthday prompt and the Stardust hint save more time than any later shortcut.
• Carrying the wrong battery: pharmacy cells must sit next to the machine. Wandering toward the pod bay with a cell in hand and no plan for the other two is how loops evaporate.
• Assuming demo progress is a save slot for September 22: it is not. Play the demo to learn the grammar. Start the full game clean.

Once that grammar clicks, move from this page to the puzzle types so you recognize a color panel or a jigsaw audio board when you see one, instead of burning power experimenting in the wrong wing.