izigame.me

With the caveat that i haven't beaten the game yet and I'm not huge into roguelikes/lites, the overall design of this game suffers in comparison to those I have played such as Hades and Inscryption (Kaycee's Mod). It's a bummer to say that because an incredible amount of work clearly went into this game and it's an impressive accomplishment. I just feel that the core design needed tweaks in order to have the broad appeal of those other games. But hey, maybe broad appeal wasn't the goal and that's fine. It's just not for me.
It's probably not fair to compare any game to Hades, but discounting art, music, and writing, the core roguelite experience here is just not as good. that mostly comes down to how thoroughly you're punished for mistakes, while sometimes not really being rewarded for playing well. since HP is your currency to get upgrades during each run, every single hit you take decreases your chances of being able to get anywhere with your current build. Thus, when you finish a room having only taken one hit, you're not so much proud of yourself as annoyed that the one hit you took might bar you from getting something you need later. And if you take a lot of hits, you'll feel you might as well just abandon the run now because there's no coming back from it.
What's more, when you do get upgrades, you're frequently making the least crappy choice rather than the best of many good/interesting choices. The game seems to randomly assign costs to relics (upgrades) with no respect to their power levels; sometimes a good relic costs 1 heart and a mediocre one costs 3. Sometimes the good relic will have a random curse attached to it, which can really fuck up your run, or sometimes it will have a blessing, making it even better. But don't rely on finding a good relic every floor. You frequently don't encounter enough upgrades to put together anything that might reasonably be called a "build." Where Hades is designed so that you re-encounter gods whose boons you've already chosen, leading towards the opportunity for synergy in almost every run, Revita seems designed with a philosophy of total randomness. You got a relic that makes your crits apply status effects? That's cool, but the chances that you'll also find one to boost your crit rate in the same run are slim to nil. There's also times when a relic you find has no effect whatsoever because its incompatible with your weapon or with a different relic you have equipped. For instance, a relic that makes your bullets home in on enemies does nothing if you've got the weapon equipped that makes your bullets orbit you. You can only discover this stuff first-hand and then try not to forget it. This anti-synergy is surprisingly frequent. Every roguelike has runs that end with the feeling of "oh, my build/deck didn't really come together that time." But in Revita it's almost every run, at least for me.
It is true that there are a great deal of relics in the game, to the point where I rarely saw the same one twice. This is in the style of Gungeon or Isaac, whereas Hades has fewer different upgrades. But... so many of the relics just tweak your core stats (range, fire rate, damage, etc), with no further effect. Or, perhaps worse, they modify a stat you can't actually see, such as crit rate / damage. There are some really cool relics as well, stuff that changes your play-style comparably to Hades's Daedalus Hammers, but I only encountered them on a handful of runs. I think fewer different relics with more thought put into each of them (along with mechanics to create a higher chance of synergy) would have benefited the play experience.
That said, for all the times I died and felt like the game had given me no opportunity to construct a good build.... I never once felt like the death wasn't my fault. The controls are tight, enemy bullet patterns are clear, and when you get hit you pretty much always know what you could have done to avoid it. The dash and jump both feel good. If Revita was a straightforward sidescrolling platformer-shooter with no rogue elements I would have no problem recommending it. And the knowledge that my deaths were always my fault made it easier to want to keep going; hence my hours of playtime. I just hit a point eventually where I realized that with my limited level of skill, it was only one in ten runs where I had good enough relics to really have a shot at the final boss. So, my own limited skills are the ultimate constraint here, but when you run up against that wall, the RNG does feel like salt in the wound.
There's a lot of cool mechanical ideas in this game. The fact that you trade your maximum health to upgrade your relics in between floors is neat. It encourages you to play daringly and consider whether you'll actually make it back to full health again or not. The boss fights are well-designed too, with patterns that you learn gradually over many deaths, and a pleasant difficulty curve starting with a pushover first boss and leading to successively more punishing ones later on. Another interesting addition is random variants of the levels that you can encounter. For instance, on this run, the first level will be darker, forcing you to look twice for foes. Or perhaps it will be extra-tight quarters, leading to anxious, cramped confrontations. This adds to the replay value more than most of the actual unlockables. Other ideas don't seem to be borne out by game logic. For instance, the ability to build portals that let you skip levels entirely. This might make sense given some endgame context I don't yet have, but right now it seems like a great way to not get any power-ups -- and yet the fact that its there, but so obviously the wrong choice, makes replaying the first levels feel more like a chore.
So, if it seems like I'm being really hard on this game, I guess it's important to note that I'm not very determined, and not very masochistic. Roguelikes work well for people who are one or both of those things. A very small number of roguelikes have really stolen my heart, so I keep looking for others that are on the same level for me. I think Revita is probably better for people who don't mind failing a run where they really had no chance of winning and then immediately starting another. Games like Hades, which put more emphasis on the LITE in roguelite, add more forms of progress between subsequent runs, and in doing so become more accessible to filthy casuals like me. The forms of progress which Revita offers you between runs mostly boil down to unlocking new relics to encounter in future runs, whose effects you likely won't care about. There isn't much that makes the game palpably easier. Of course, to many people that's not a downside at all. I guess more vitally for me, there isn't much to unlock that adds significant variety to your future runs. Getting new weapons are fun, but there aren't a ton of them, and the relics start to feel samey pretty fast.
In closing, I'm sure a lot of people appreciate the purity of the experience with Revita -- the uncompromising calculus of its sacrifice-based upgrade system, the utter randomness of its upgrade choices. I think a lot of those people hail from the original generation of rogue-like-likers, people who came up on Binding of Isaac, Gungeon, and, well, Rogue (though they would probably tell me it's wrong to group all those together in the first place). For people like me who got into the genre through Hades, I try to temper my judgments with humility and maintain respect for that tradition of hardcore, masochistic roguelikes and the people who play them. Likewise, I hope people who have the gumption to enjoy Revita can also understand where more casual players like me might be coming from. I guess the main takeaway is that if you want to enjoy this or any other roguelike, know which of those two types of players you are. And which type of game you're looking at. If you're looking for another Hades, look elsewhere.