Throw Me in the River 1 Year Anniversary Sale / Celebration!

Throw Me in the River launched 1 year ago!

For the next 10 days, enjoy a deep sale on Throw Me in the River. Own the game forever for an incredibly low price!

A personal note from director / writer Reis Mahnic:

To those who purchased and/or Kickstarted the game, thank you all so much for your support. It really means the world to me and to the team that you checked the game out, and if you did, I hope you got something out of it. Maybe that something was personal to you, maybe that something was just a bizarre, short experience that you didn't totally click with but still stuck in your head. Regardless, I'm happy to hear that it affected you in some way.

Throw Me in the River was an incredibly personal game to create. I first drafted the earliest version of River almost ten years ago, and it evolved significantly over the years; in 2015 I built a 15 minute long version of the game in Adventure Game Studio for a game jam. It differed significantly from this final version, but a lot of similar themes were found throughout. I built it shortly after my grandfather passed away. Before he did, on his deathbed, my family was discussing how he wanted the funeral to be handled. He responded, 'Funeral? What funeral? When I go, wrap me in a blanket and throw me in the river!', and I found the game's title.

When I was growing up in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, my friends and I would explore abandoned buildings, and that informed the sequence at the end of the scene set in the 50s; Nic Freeman, Throw Me in the River's artist, worked off of photos of one such building I still had that were pulled from my old flip phone from the mid 2000s for reference. This game meant a lot to me to be able to make, but I also hope that you were able to bring some of your own life into the characters and events as you played the game.

All told we worked on Throw Me in the River for about two years. This likely seems like a long time to work on a short visual novel like this, but the primary difficulty was in funding the game. I worked a day job and provided what I could to the project, and we funded the first half of the game entirely out of pocket. We funded the second half of the project using Kickstarter. Meetings with publishers did not go well; publishers simply were not interested in a slow paced story of the life of some random guy in Canada. All told the project cost just under three thousand dollars; a remarkably low sum of money for the development of a video game, but an enormous sum to us.

This brings me to my final point: that's still an enormous sum of money to us. A lot of people have asked me over the last year what I've been working on. The truth is, while I have many stories lined up and ready to go, Throw Me in the River has not sold well over the last year. We do not have a way to get the game onto people's radars; it is expected that even as an indie developer and publisher you are ready and able to pay large sums of money to get booths at various shows to attract the attention of press, and even then it would be an uphill battle given