The Rivers of Alice - Extended Version

I have a soft spot for games that feel like they were made for one specific person, and somehow that person turns out to be me. The Rivers of Alice - Extended Version is that kind of game: a hand-drawn point-and-click adventure built from a genuine artistic collaboration between Spanish indie-rock band Vetusta Morla, who composed 13 original tracks exclusively for the project, and artist Ane Pikaza, whose watercolor, ink, and pencil work fills every one of the game's 15 screens. The result is something you rarely encounter - a short game that carries real aesthetic weight. The setup is simple and dreamlike by design. Alice falls asleep, her locket releases four dragonflies into a surreal fantasy world, and you help her recover them while she quietly confronts the fears shaping her waking life - sloth, envy, dishonesty. All interactions use just four verbs: look, touch, speak, use an item. No combat, no fail states, no timers bearing down on you. The 20 puzzles range from intuitive to genuinely opaque; one has you tapping flowers arranged like musical notes in sequence, another involves rigging an hourglass to extend a timed task. The in-game hint system delivers clues as poetic lines rather than direct instructions, which fits the atmosphere but will frustrate anyone who wants clarity over mood. A few puzzles lean on obscure logic that feels more arbitrary than dreamlike, and Alice's walking speed is, without exaggeration, glacial. If you pixel-hunt without patience, this will wear you down. What holds everything together is the sound. The score shifts per screen, moving from soft guitar to something closer to a somber folk lullaby, and the game's own loading screens advise headphones. That is not precious developer affectation - it is genuinely good advice. The music is the connective tissue between puzzle screens that might otherwise feel isolated, and it gives the pacing its rhythm. Visually, Pikaza's choice to render Alice herself in black and white against a world saturated with color is either pure symbolism or happy accident; either way it lands. The world is teeming with peculiar characters - a giant multi-eyed creature here, an apartment building whose lights you coax on from a clifftop by reading constellations there - and each screen is composed like an illustration you would stop to look at on a gallery wall. Honestly, the game is short. Two to three hours depending on how often you get stuck. There is not much reason to revisit it once completed, and the open-ended narrative leaves enough unsaid that some players will leave feeling slightly adrift rather than resolved. The PC version carries over most of the experience cleanly, though reports of occasional bugs and minor timing glitches between animations and sound have followed the game across platforms. None of it is critical, but polish is not this game's strong suit. Its strong suits are mood, craft, and the quiet confidence of knowing exactly what kind of experience it wants to be. If you are the kind of player who still thinks about the soundscape of a game weeks after finishing it, The Rivers of Alice will leave a mark. If you need narrative structure, action, or a hint system that actually points at the answer, you may find it too impressionistic for its own good. For what it is - a brief, handmade dream with one of the most cohesive art-and-music pairings in small-scale indie games - it earns its place.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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