What if Celine Dion and Elliott Smith fell in love? A video game dares to ask the question

polygon.com:

From the creator of Rivals and Echo Beach, music detective game Riley & Rochelle is inspired by an imaginative question: What if ’90s music legends Celine Dion and Elliott Smith met and fell in love? Riley & Rochelle, of course, isn’t about Dion or Smith — it’s about Riley and Rochelle, naturally, two fictional ’90s musicians from two very different genres.

Sheinman Games founder Tim Sheinman told Polygon he was listening to a podcast on the 1998 Oscars — where Dion was nominated for Titanic’s “My Heart Will Go On,” and Smith for Good Will Hunting’s “Miss Misery,” — when he got the idea: “What… if they fell in love?”

In Riley & Rochelle, the player will listen to the musicians’ work, read their journals, and research their lives to pull together who they were and how they fell in love in the 1990s. There are clues everywhere: within the original music itself and in other documents and journal entries. It’s a new take on the music detective game genre that Sheinman’s been iterating on for years in games likeRivals, which follows an alt-country band, and Echo Beach, where music is illegal and tracked online.

Riley & Rochelle doesn’t have a release date just yet, but its Steam page has it listed as “coming soon” on Windows PC and Mac. Sheinman said it’s expected before 2023. It’ll cost $14.99.