Point-and-click puzzler Reviver looks like Good Night Moon, but plays out like War and Peace

Dayten Rose, 21 January 2025

Reviver has been hell on my mouse. I start each chapter by clicking every inch of screen space to uncover new easter eggs and background animations. A few hours later, I’m clicking around for an entirely different reason, desperately searching for any clue that might bail me out of its deceptively thorny puzzles. Reviver delights as much as it vexes, and although its individual parts are somewhat inconsistent, the whole package is surprisingly propulsive.

Thankfully, Reviver’s aesthetic remains reliable throughout. The hand-drawn style, which I’d describe as “a Rusty Lake you could bring home for the holidays,” is gorgeous. Screens are dense with detail, every object has some satisfying interaction, and the artist’s enthusiasm is undeniable and infectious.

I’m especially impressed by how scenes evolve to reflect the personalities of the characters as they age. Carlos, an adventurous entomologist, eventually trades the bug journals and butterfly nets of his childhood bedroom for a jungle treehouse as he delves into ancient ruins. The itinerant artist Felicia hangs old sketches on the wall of her city apartment above the many trophies she’s collected.

A magic coin, one of the game’s two core gimmicks, lets you hop between the two characters’ perspectives at will, using items and information from one to help solve puzzles in the other. These perspectives influence the types of puzzles you encounter, too, with Felicia solving more A Little to the Left-type organization puzzles and Carlos more traditional codebreaking, which is a nice touch.

Maybe because the game’s art is so inviting, or a narrative about love and missed connections seems so fanciful, but I expected to settle in for a chill, dare I say cozy experience. But Reviver brought hands. My review notes quickly filled up with and diagrams, symbols, math problems. Dear reader, I had to bring out the graph paper.

It’s not that I struggle to grasp the theme of each puzzle, per se. Reviver offers a huge variety of challenges, from Reversi to riddles to one of the less offensive versions of the Die Hard with a Vengeance jug puzzle I’ve played to date. But that variety prevents me from developing any system mastery. I blaze through some puzzles and stall for a half hour or more on others.

Further complicating matters is the localization. Generally, Reviver’s writing is pretty compelling, but hiccups in the English grammar and spelling cast a shadow of doubt over written puzzles. After enough time banging my head against a passage, I have to wonder whether the text is misrepresenting something important.

Reviver plays to its strengths by presenting most puzzles visually, and it seems like the devs are already keen on continuing to refine the experience through updates. Even in the game’s current state, I’m mostly able to undo the game’s thornier knots without resorting to guesswork.

But cracks in the writing compound into a narrative that fails to gel into something really cohesive. Reviver’s second core mechanic, which allows the player to hop back and forth in time, foreshadows a story about how small moments build to major consequences. One early journal entry from Carlos laments how he wished he’d talked to that girl he’d seen a year ago. Solving a puzzle in Felicia’s timeline causes their paths to cross, kickstarting decades of star-crossed love.

A chapter later, though, the “small moments” in question are as zany as Felicia mistaking venomous snakes for ropes, and correcting that mistake means solving a block puzzle to extract the snakes before they can cause any trouble.

I appreciate a game that stretches narratively to accommodate its core puzzle mechanics, but the result is that Reviver’s exploration of regret doesn’t hit as hard as I’d hoped. The trailer does seem to imply some light horror game shenanigans are on the horizon, but eight hours in, I’ve only caught whiffs of its more eldritch sensibilities.

Reviver’s devils are certainly in its details, but despite its failings, it continues to impress me with sheer style and inventiveness. Enough of those stumbling blocks stem from my decision to play the game on PC—long sittings, singular focus, mouse-and-keyboard—that I wonder whether Reviver: Butterfly, a mobile version releasing later this month, isn’t the game’s intended experience.

In any case, the good outweighs the ugly. You could certainly do worse for a traditional point-and-click experience, and if nothing else there’s a ton here to sink your teeth into.