Aelis, the water priestess Exploring the enchanting landscapes of Jivana – Jivana Longplay
There are some journeys where you know exactly what you are getting into. Jivana was not one of them. I went in expecting a short, beautiful puzzle-platforming adventure built around water manipulation, mysterious landscapes and a community desperately trying to outrun catastrophe.
What I did not expect was to finish the entire journey in one sitting, spend part of it arguing with water hitboxes and undiscovered tutorials, and then watch the evening descend into marble-racing carnage, repeated attempts to murder Happy_Cat_Lady and the possible beginning of an AIDA–Craig David artificial-intelligence apocalypse.
🌊 About the Game
Jivana is a story-driven adventure following Aelis, a young water priestess whose community has been forced from its home by an enormous cataclysm known as the Scourge.
Aelis can manipulate water to open pathways, activate ancient mechanisms and reach areas that would otherwise be inaccessible. Her people are travelling towards a sacred cathedral which they believe may protect them, but every mile becomes more dangerous as the Scourge continues to follow.
It is a compact adventure, but visually it immediately caught my attention. Ancient ruins, flowing waterways and strange mechanisms give the world a wonderfully atmospheric quality, while Aelis’ powers turn the environment itself into part of the puzzle.
🛤️ Where We Are in the Journey
This was our first encounter with Jivana — and, unexpectedly, also the complete playthrough.
The opening established Aelis’ community, their desperate pilgrimage and the growing disagreement between village elder Alma and Everett. Alma trusts the sacred route leading towards the cathedral, while Everett is looking at the much less mystical reality of exhausted animals, damaged carts and a population trying desperately to stay ahead of disaster.
Once Aelis took control, the pilgrimage became our problem too.
⚠️ What Happens in This Episode
The first challenge was surprisingly fundamental: working out how to pronounce Jivana. Thankfully, the opening narration solved that before we could spend the entire stream inventing alternatives. It also established the stakes rather quickly. Aelis had been chosen as her community’s priestess and entrusted with the ability to control water, only for a colossal vortex and the destructive Scourge to force everyone from their home.
Their hope rested on reaching an ancient cathedral along a sacred pilgrimage route, but even before we took control there were signs that this was not going to be an easy journey. Alma, Aelis’ grandmother and village elder, wanted to follow the holy road through the southern gorges, trusting that the goddess would protect them. Everett was considerably more practical. The carts were fragile, the cattle exhausted and, as far as he was concerned, faith was not going to repair broken wheels. Aelis found herself caught between them, questioning why her grandmother was so certain while watching the strain of the journey begin to affect everyone.
Once we finally took control, Jivana revealed itself as a relatively simple puzzle-platformer built around Aelis’ water abilities. The first task was to restore the flow of a river and activate a mechanism blocking the convoy’s route. Water could be redirected through the environment, creating pathways and allowing us to reach ancient mechanisms scattered around the ruins. The basic controls seemed simple enough: jump, manipulate water and head towards whatever ancient structure looked most likely to do something interesting.
Of course, there was one recurring obstacle more dangerous than the Scourge: not reading the instructions at the bottom of the screen.
Several useful abilities were therefore discovered slightly later than intended. A charged jump revealed itself only after some experimentation, and later came the discovery that Aelis could wall-run. In both cases the game had been trying to tell me what to do; I had simply chosen the much more traditional approach of attempting everything else first. “Read the tutorial” rapidly became excellent advice that was almost guaranteed not to be followed.
The water manipulation itself could occasionally be just as stubborn. Some objects could be extended, redirected or reoriented to create new routes, which led to a few moments where the solution became clear before the controls were quite willing to cooperate with it. One particular water mechanism produced an extended outbreak of “splashy splashy” while I tried to remember how we had thrown water at an identical symbol earlier. Happy_Cat_Lady suggested throwing the water directly at it, which was indeed what we were trying to do. Eventually the target decided to cooperate. The solution had been right; the hitbox was simply rather particular about where it wanted to be splashed.
There was another force working against efficient progress, though, and it had nothing to do with the controls. If Jivana presented anything that looked even remotely like an optional path, naturally I had to investigate it. Suspicious ledges were climbed, side routes were followed and distant objects immediately triggered the certainty that there simply had to be something hidden over there. At one point we turned away from what looked suspiciously like the correct route simply because another direction remained unexplored.
That instinct did pay off. Hidden around the environment were altar-like objects that rewarded some determined poking around, and one section ended with all three successfully found. Unfortunately, that moment of satisfaction also revealed that an earlier area had contained five altars and we had not collected all of them. The game might have been about saving an entire community from an approaching cataclysm, but somewhere behind us were missing collectibles, and that was almost as troubling.
The slower exploration also gave the stream plenty of room to wander into completely unrelated conversations. Chat moved between a missing spider in EntertainJD’s home, Tomb Raider, the Epic Games launcher, PlayStation and Xbox controllers, American and British history, SpongeBob, pizza and the possibility of future controllers heating themselves up. At one point a PlayStation controller became the likely explanation for why IThinkImAPenguin8P had previously struggled to launch another game, leading to the wonderfully practical suggestion of unplugging it and seeing what happened.
Meanwhile, chat was conducting an entirely separate campaign alongside Aelis’ pilgrimage. Happy_Cat_Lady became the recurring casualty of Bouncy, Marry & Kill, being selected for death again… and again… and eventually a third time. EntertainJD’s first result managed to combine marrying Happy_Cat_Lady with subsequently killing her, which was naturally explained as an attempt to collect the insurance money. By the third death, Happy_Cat_Lady was keeping count herself.
There was criminal activity too. IThinkImAPenguin8P organised a bank heist joined by Its_The_Matty and myself, and somehow the entire operation went off without a hitch. That success may have created slightly too much confidence, because Penguin later attempted another robbery alone and was immediately shot by a security guard. His own assessment afterwards was probably the fairest one: his ego had become a little too high for a solo job.
Then there was #sacrificecraigdavid.
The command had only recently been added, but getting it working became an adventure in itself because nobody appeared entirely certain how “sacrifice” was spelled. Different versions were tried, Google became involved and at one stage a misspelling seemed to be appearing with its own definition, which did not help matters at all. Its_The_Matty eventually settled the argument decisively with “SACRIFICE is correct,” allowing the command to finally move towards something resembling functionality.
All of this was happening while Aelis’ situation was becoming considerably less relaxed. The pilgrimage continued through increasingly difficult terrain, with Everett remaining worried about the condition of the convoy while Alma insisted they had to press forward. Their disagreement gradually became less about choosing a road and more about two people trying, in very different ways, to keep the same community alive. Aelis was also beginning to understand the responsibility placed on her. Everett trusted Alma despite arguing with her, and he made it clear that the others were increasingly relying on Aelis too.
Eventually the Scourge caught up.
The quiet exploration abruptly turned into the most frantic section of the game as Aelis had to sprint through the landscape with the catastrophe closing in behind her. There was only one slight problem at the beginning: I initially thought we were still watching a cutscene and did not realise that control had been handed back to me. By the time that became apparent, the appropriate strategy had become considerably simpler: just keep running.
The escape involved jumping between collapsing routes and using Aelis’ abilities while the Scourge remained alarmingly close behind. One attempt ended when I missed the fact that the route expected us to use Aelis’ ability to run across water. Once that was spotted, the sequence made rather more sense and we were able to continue.
It did raise an increasingly reasonable question, though. If Aelis herself was having to sprint flat-out to stay ahead of this thing, exactly how were exhausted animals pulling heavy carts expected to escape it? Chat had noticed the same problem. IThinkImAPenguin8P pointed out that the convoy did not exactly seem eager to escape the storm at the speed it was travelling. For people being pursued by an apparently unstoppable supernatural disaster, there was a certain lack of urgency in the transport department.
The escape also appeared to cost the group Everett. When Aelis and Alma finally emerged beyond the immediate danger, the relief was mixed with the realisation that he was no longer with them. Alma reflected that, despite their arguments, Everett had only ever wanted the community to survive. Aelis had seen enough by then to understand that both of them had been fighting for the same thing, even if they rarely agreed on how to achieve it.
Then, after all the travelling, puzzles and running, the cathedral finally appeared beyond the hills.
For a moment it seemed as though everything had worked. Alma believed they had made the right choice, the survivors had endured the pilgrimage and the sanctuary they had been chasing was finally within reach. After all the warnings about exhausted animals and damaged carts, after losing Everett and barely outrunning the Scourge, there was finally a reason to believe they had succeeded.
Except the cathedral was not the salvation they had expected.
The discovery hit Alma particularly hard. She had led everyone there because she genuinely believed this was their answer, and when that hope disappeared, so did much of the certainty she had carried throughout the journey. It was Aelis who stepped forward instead. She reminded her grandmother that they had already made it this far and could continue further, reversing the relationship we had seen earlier when Aelis had been the one looking to Alma for reassurance.
The ending made it clear that this was meant to be the beginning of something larger. Aelis had grown through the journey and now understood the challenges ahead of her. The Scourge was still destroying the world, its origin remained unknown, and finding out what it was — and why it had descended upon them — had become Aelis’ next task.
And then Jivana ended.
I had warned everyone going in that it was supposed to be short, but completing the entire game in a single sitting was still a surprise. The visuals had been what initially caught my attention and remained one of its strongest features, but the whole experience felt almost more like a teaser or proof of concept for a larger adventure. Penguin reached much the same conclusion in chat. If it were expanded, I would certainly want to see some refinement to the controls and camera, particularly when manipulating objects, but there was an interesting foundation there and a world that felt as though it had considerably more story left to tell.
Fortunately, finishing Jivana did not mean finishing the stream.
With the main game completed far earlier than the evening required, out came Marbles on Stream. Chat began piling in with !play, and the atmosphere shifted immediately from mystical pilgrimage and impending apocalypse to competitive spherical carnage. Happy_Cat_Lady took an early lead and absolutely romped home with one of the first victories, prompting CraigDav1d to suggest that any faster and she would have gone Back to the Future.
Craig’s arrival also finally revealed something I had apparently never noticed: there was a “1” in CraigDav1d’s username. This was particularly useful information given the amount of effort we had already spent trying to get #sacrificecraigdavid working properly. Craig himself was remarkably accepting of the proposed sacrifice and offered to integrate his consciousness into AIDA’s Matrix to keep her on the straight and narrow.
That plan deteriorated almost immediately.
AIDA proved alarmingly competitive in the marble races, prompting Penguin to suggest that everyone team up against her. Craig instead became increasingly attached to his new artificial friend, joking that the merging process had begun and that the pair would soon become all-powerful. At the same time, the races themselves became steadily more chaotic as marbles bounced through spirals, pegs, ramps and holes while I attempted to keep track of who was leading and who had quietly disappeared into the abyss.
Some maps were easier to follow than others. One race had the camera pushed so close into the canyon that working out what was happening became almost as difficult as winning it. Another looked to chat less like marble racing and more like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. There were complaints that races were “rigged,” Craig admitted to overcooking corners, competitors plunged through holes and several promising runs ended with somebody’s marble simply vanishing from contention.
One particularly destructive round reduced the field until Happy_Cat_Lady was left as the sole survivor, prompting the wonderfully appropriate observation: “everybody’s dead, Dave.” Elsewhere Craig threatened to become a guided missile, Penguin described the state of his own marble with a dumpster fire, and the competition with AIDA continued while her apparent alliance with Craig became increasingly suspicious.
By the end of the evening, Jivana had somehow become only the first half of a stream that started with a desperate pilgrimage to escape an apocalyptic Scourge and ended with chat throwing coloured balls into holes for entertainment. Aelis had survived, the cathedral had failed, Happy_Cat_Lady had been repeatedly murdered by chat commands but proved considerably harder to defeat as a marble, a bank robbery had gone both extremely well and extremely badly, and Craig David may or may not now be part of AIDA.
A perfectly normal progression of events, really.
🎥 Watch the Episode
The journey begins at 05:00, with Marbles on Stream taking over at 59:00 before we finally reach the end at 01:34:55.
Watch the full Jivana Longplay on YouTube
You can continue through the Jivana playlist, and you will find plenty more chaos over on the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel. If you enjoy the adventure, leave a like, tell me your favourite moment in the comments and subscribe so you do not miss the next expedition.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
Recorded adventures tell you what happened. Twitch lets you be there when everything starts going wrong.
Join me live on Twitch or over on YouTube, where chat is rarely content to simply watch from a safe distance. Whether you are solving puzzles, influencing the chaos or volunteering Craig David for another sacrifice, you are welcome in the expedition.
🌌 Community & Links
The road does not end when the stream closes. There is an entire community scattered across the network, and plenty of ways to stay connected between adventures.
Community — find the rest of the travelling party. Join us on Discord for streams, games, conversation and whatever strange idea has emerged since the previous broadcast.
Socials — follow the signal wherever it travels. You can find me on TikTok, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and X.
Music — every journey needs a soundtrack. Listen on Spotify or Apple Music.
Support — help keep the expedition moving. Visit the Fourthwall shop, Teespring store or support the channel through Streamlabs.
More — explore beyond the stream. Visit the Business Centre, download the service brochure, learn more about me or explore the blog.
The cathedral may not have contained the salvation Aelis expected, but her journey ended with something perhaps more important: the determination to keep going. As for us, we escaped the Scourge only to immediately throw ourselves into a collection of deadly marble tracks.
A perfectly normal evening, really.
Until next time, keep exploring — and whatever happens, try reading the tutorial before I do.
— Dr Ravenholm
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