Riley & Rochelle Review

Riley & Rochelle is, first and foremost, a love story. While it has the guise of a point-and-click detective game, it’s also so much more than that. We follow a woman called Niamh as she works on a documentary about the eponymous couple. As she makes her documentary, she has records on vinyl, diary entries, letters, interviews, and news stories about them. Our job as the player is to match the dates to the events. We have to read and listen to everything we have at our disposal and figure out when specific events took place. Starting from the ‘90s, we watch the story of Riley & Rochelle unfold as we watch their careers grow and their relationships form.

I truly enjoyed Riley & Rochelle, but I also got frustrated with some of the puzzles. Not every bit of info is in the game, and you will have to Google some key events from history to find out the dates. However, as I’m playing this from the UK, I won’t have the same kind of information readily available from US and Canadian news sources in the ‘90s.

There are some puzzles that I just had to guess the actual day for, while the month was readily available. In some cases, I had to return to previous months, especially if a letter said, “On this day, this happened.” While it could make things easier, I also found that it made things more tedious.

You have to click through each year individually and then make sure you remember as you make your way back to where you were. While you can go back by clicking to the right and going straight to Chapter 1, it was still pretty time consuming. So, I definitely would have preferred to have some kind of archive to go to specific years.

Of course, it wasn’t always the same puzzles. Nor was it only about Riley and Rochelle. I found that the supporting cast was also fun to hear about. They all had their own opinions about the couple, so it was fun to delve into some more lore about them. There are a few mini puzzles where you have to find clues and link each character to one another, such as family trees and band roles. It was also a fun way to introduce other elements that might not be as pivotal to the plot.

But the best part of the game by far? The soundtrack. Both Riley and Rochelle are musicians, so the soundtrack is essential. In fact, the soundtrack merged perfectly with the art style, and it really felt like an indie art project. It was a different type of narrative experience that I hadn’t expected. I found myself getting lost into this game, and I didn’t want to stop playing it.

Well, that was unless I was stuck on a puzzle. Then I may have sworn a few times because I couldn’t find out certain dates. The thing about getting stuck on this game was that it didn’t feel like a fair challenge. I was paying attention to everything, but I genuinely couldn’t figure out the dates for some events. I spent ages analysing, and then I went back to the game again after taking a break, and I was still lost.

Hence, my belief that a good portion was a guessing game. Most of the answers could be figured out by looking at everything you were given, but some felt too niche. Of course, I’m a sucker for a good story, so I powered through this because I wanted to know more.

As I played through more of the story, I admit, I shipped Riley and Rochelle. But we don’t get to see much of their relationship play out before we have the option to continue past their break up and into the 21st century. Now, dear reader, I admit: I don’t know what happens if you try to end here. Mostly because I’ve already told you that I was invested, and so I was not going to leave until I had my answers about what happened.

So naturally, I would assume the game ends there and we never find out what happened to them in the future. But if you keep going, there are more mysteries for you to solve. You get to see them grow, and it’s great, because you can see how everyone else around them has also grown. Time passes in this game, but it does so naturally. Nothing feels forced, and everything feels so natural.

However, when I played this, I was under the impression that there would be even more as the years do go up to 2010. After this? Well, there’s only Chapter 8 left. Once that’s over, you need to cement how you finish your documentary and who the hero of the story is.

Ultimately, I was underwhelmed by the endings I got. The amount of time we spent with Riley and Rochelle as a couple was limited. After all that we went through to get them together, I expected more. I suppose it’s a testament to the actual story that I got so invested, but it was bittersweet nonetheless.

However, in spite of the length of the game (which could have been longer, and I thought it would be), I found that I enjoyed it a great deal. The four endings did make a lot of sense, and it showed how even with the research, we don’t have a clear view of what happened to them before the end of the documentary.

Honestly, outside of some frustrating clues, I thought that it was a fun game that truly embraced ‘90s nostalgia and culture.