Every once in a while, I come across a game that reminds me of the alluring curiosities I have found walking around an artisan craft fair. Reviver was one of those games. Poking around the steam page felt like stepping up to a booth brimming with the charm of a proud artist.
Cotton Game, the developer of Reviver, has built their reputation by combining “new media art with rich visual storytelling, creating immersive and captivating art spaces for players to explore.” Reviver feels like their most ambitious project yet, taking a very complex narrative device and applying it to a slew of scenery variations to create the sensation of multiple realities.
The story explores the Butterfly Effect in the lives of two protagonists whose stories are both parallel and intersecting, tethered and untethered. The player is the catalyst, flipping back and forth through time to change past circumstances and create new future states. For instance, there is a moment early in the game where a very young Carlos and Felicia, strangers to each other, attend the same event in town but never meet. Nothing would make these characters stand out to each other in a crowd, so their lives continue along separate paths. However, once the player solves a puzzle that has Felicia drawing a picture of a butterfly, the same butterfly that Carlos had seen in a dream the night before, he approaches her upon recognising the picture, and both their destinies are intertwined.
While it would have been very easy to get lost in the plot of a game that is constantly rearranging and altering the script, fortunately the developers have included a notebook that tracks the story for the player. You can see the impact of Butterfly Effect in a very tactile manner, as pages in the notebook are scratched out and pasted over with new events while the player meddles in the past. I was often referring back to this notebook to not only understand how the narrative was changing but to also look down the road to where the story was headed.
The journey is heartfelt and has many profound interpersonal moments. Carols and Felicia both share a love for adventure that plays out for each of them differently as they grow up. Felicia takes to art and becomes a very skilled fantasy illustrator and writer, while Carlos favours archaeology and expeditions. What keeps both of their stories moving forward is their connection, and most of the puzzles in the game will emphasise the ways they help each other progress. Tragedy will befall these two friends, but you will rewrite history so that their interactions will make a timeline with more auspicious outcomes. Without spoiling the end, I can say I was quite pleased with the emotional payoff of a plot that was constantly being spliced and re-spliced together.
The writing aside, the first impression most players will have of this game is the strong visual identity. The point of view is a single scene, beautifully hand-drawn and embellished by all sorts of micro-animations. As the player flips between different moments in time, the same scene will change dramatically, revealing the results of certain past decisions and the ageing of our protagonists. Each scene is an immersive box of wonders with puzzles to solve, secrets to find, and artwork to stare at as your eyes linger on each facet. The gentle piano and strings that accompany the gameplay give this game a very cosy atmosphere, deepening the connection to the characters.
Though the art style beckoned me to just chill out and vibe with Reviver, I found myself too busy with the puzzles, scratching my head and sometimes banging it in an effort to move forward. The gameplay sees the player flipping between different moments in time, as mentioned earlier, but also swapping between Felicia and Carlos. Thus, you may have as many as 6 different scenes available to you between both characters, each with dozens of puzzles to solve that unlock the way forward.
The puzzles were at their best in the form of mini-games, lovingly animated and detailed to capture attention. Each was like picking up a toy at a toystore to fidget with for a few minutes. However, the same could not be said of the point-and-click puzzles that made up the backbone of this game. Though fairly standard mechanically, these puzzles tended to be obtuse and bewildering as I tried to figure out what things I could combine in my inventory and where I needed to put each item among all of the different scenes. The scenes are very detailed, each one a visual treat, but this did cause some environmental readability when it came to figuring out where to find and place items to solve the puzzles.
Perhaps my confusion with the point-and-click puzzles would have been mitigated if there was a more user-friendly hint system, but I couldn’t find much help from the one provided. The hint system boils down to getting a little visual cue for things to click on, which did jumpstart the process for me in finding new things to do. Still, once I clicked on the thing, it just left me there holding my newfound object…with no idea what to do with it. The journal can also provide some vague hints, but I was grasping at straws trying to find my next step on numerous occasions. Unfortunately, I had to follow a Youtube walkthrough to get me through the game, which completely broke immersion. It was quite a disappointment that the writing that connected all these puzzles together was so much stronger than the puzzles themselves, as their ambiguity just felt out-of-step with the narrative and atmosphere this game was trying to create.
Verdict
In the end, Reviver felt to me like a gorgeous tabletop game I was sold at an artisan craft fair. It came complete with handmade and colourfully illustrated game pieces as well as an inventive, heartwarming narrative lovingly written into the game manual. Yet, when I brought it home and sat down to play it, I realised it was not as intuitive as it looked. I spent much more time with the paltry set of instructions than I should, just to make sense of what I was supposed to do next. Decorative, disjointed, but a promising concept if only the core puzzle design could be reworked. Perhaps in another timeline this game blew me away, but at present, it is not quite there.
- Release Date
- 09th January 2025
- Platforms
- PC
- Developer
- Cotton Game
- Publisher
- Cotton Game
- Accessibility
- Hints can be toggled on or off, resolution can be customised and set to full screen or windowed mode, language can be customised, and sound and music volume can be adjusted.
Many thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

About the author
Erik
About the author
Erik
Erik is a lifelong writer, designer, and gamer. He is the host of Pages of Play Podcast, a book club for gaming narratives. His podcast digs deep into story-driven games, in which he and his cohosts answer book club style discussion questions submitted by listeners. His aim is to bring a unique perspective to the gaming discourse, focused on application and reflection, to enrich the human experience. He lives with his wife and two kids in Chicago.