Thank you to Dear Villagers for the review code!

Revita is a roguelite platformer dungeon crawler with procedurally generated levels. You start a run, work to get as far up as you possibly can, die, and repeat. It's the same formula that has been followed by games in the genre for many years now, though possessing a system for progression between runs makes it a roguelite instead of a roguelike. Don't be fooled, however—Revita is not an easy game. Far from it. Under the deceptively charming music and visuals lies one of the most challenging roguelites I've ever played, but we'll discuss that in time. For now, let's talk about the setting.

Upon first opening the game, you'll get a warning about depressing or heavy themes that sets the tone for what you should expect. When you reach the title screen, you'll see a boy staring into the distance at a clock tower. This child is your character, and you'll be the one to take him through a series of elevators and metros on a journey to reach the top. You start in a peaceful hub world where you can spend currency earned through your runs to make things easier on yourself and talk to some of the only friendly characters in the game. Once you start a run and take the metro to the tower, you'll fight bizarre and misshapen monsters that assault you with increasing barrages of bullets and bosses named after emotional concepts like "Bargaining", "Depression", and "Acceptance." The story is revealed to you slowly by characters you meet along the way. Everyone but you seems to be acutely aware of what this place is and why you shouldn't keep trying to climb it, but no one is willing to tell you. All you are told is that you have no hope of trying to break this endless cycle of life and death, and that each time you return in rebellion, you lose a piece of yourself in the process. So, will you give up, or will you press on? At the end of the line, should you choose to continue, you'll find the answers you've been looking for.

As Revita is a roguelite, the game remains relatively consistent between runs with some random items throughout that can be found to spice up your run. There are different stages that each have their own themes, monsters, and bosses, with each stage having 10-13 floors. In the beginning, you start runs with a base blaster that has decent range and does good damage, and your sole movement options are a jump and a dash with a bit of invulnerability. You have four heart pieces that take two hits each, and two empty bars beneath your hearts for storing souls. You gather souls by killing monsters, and after getting a full chunk of the soul bar you can charge yourself with the souls to recover half a heart piece, a move that takes 2-3 seconds and leaves you vulnerable. And if you charge while your hearts are full, you'll overheal, and start building another heart piece with each bar making a third of a heart.

Essentially, the better and safer you play, the more the game rewards you with extra HP. You can also find random pickups across the game after beating floors or in trades. There are shops, chests, and idols that can sell or give you pickups, but it will cost you your hearts. Some of these pickups do things like make your bullets split into three while doing less damage, giving you an extra jump, increasing your max damage, having a higher chance of crits, and so on. But there are also curses and blesses that can be attached to certain items, like all shops costing more or having one extra HP. All these systems make the experience each run interesting and unique due to the different combinations you can create along the way, keeping you on your toes as you decide how much of your safety you're willing to sacrifice in the hopes of getting stronger. You can never take more than a half heart of damage per hit, but each new stage brings enemies and bosses closer to a bullet-hell game, meaning that extra health may be useful as you rely more on skill than buffs.

As you play through the game and eventually lose numerous times, you'll find that there is a staggering amount of content to unlock. The monster kills you earn in a run are converted to a currency called Soul Coins you can use back at the hub area, while boss kills are converted to a second currency called Materials. You can spend Materials on unlocking blueprints, items that can add cosmetics to the hub world or make serious changes to your runs. Changes like a chainmeter that allows you to earn more souls per kill if you can kill enemies quickly, or a new room that fully heals you and can randomly appear in your runs. You can unlock blueprints by spending Soul Coins at shops, or by completing achievements in your runs like gaining 4 max HP through charging. There are also different starting guns with unique characteristics unlocked with Soul Coins, like a shotgun that has high damage but low range, a sniper rifle that has high range, damage and crit rate but shoots slowly, or a gun that shoots bullets that orbit around you—a weapon I particularly dislike.

Throughout your runs, you'll collect prison keys that represent locked items. When you return to the hub world, you can take these keys to a character known as The Imprisoned who will allow you to buy the items with Soul Coins. Once you've purchased these new items known as Relics, you'll start with up to two of them in the next run, and from there on you'll be able to find or purchase the Relics you've unlocked in the tower. Relics are basically more powerful pickups that do very specific things to benefit you, like decreasing the number of floors per stage, or making your bullets follow your aim. However, some Relics are trade-offs, like increasing fire and crit. rate while decreasing damage, or making future Relics blessed but cursing you when picking them up. Between stages, you can spend max HP at a blacksmith on the metro to upgrade your Relics. When it comes to Relics, you must balance the good with the bad and be aware of how a good choice now could come back to bite you later.

Visually the game is stunning with an incredible level of fluidity in the pixel art. It's one of the few games made with an art style like this that has a strong sense of squash and stretch, giving every animation in the game impact and weight while still managing to feel responsive. Items, characters, and monsters use large pixels for their sprites that make the game feel like an extremely polished GBA title in HD, which is one of my favorite generations for pixel art. The monster designs are all interesting and visually distinct from the backgrounds, which themselves are detailed and match the theme of the stage you are on. One stage features neon mushrooms growing from the walls and toxic poison traps, another features lush forests riddled with undergrowth and sharp spikes on the floor, and another bitterly cold caves with slippery ice on the floor and dangerous icicles falling from the ceiling. But even beyond the wonderful pixel art and animations, there has been a lot of effort put into visual effects. The game has pretty lighting baked into the sprites, but there are also dynamic lights and bloom effects that add to the atmosphere. The water reflections are beautiful, and the way the game balances foreground elements in front of the playable space reminds me a lot of KINGDOM, a series I also loved for its art style and visual effects.

In terms of sound design, I'm mostly pleased. I think the sound effects are a bit weak, but they still match the visuals well enough. The sounds of the metro blowing and clacking as it passes by, the elevator ratcheting shut each time you enter a new floor, bullets thunking against the floors and walls, and rushing wind when eliminating a monster help breathe a little life into the soundscape. The music, however, is very good. Each stage has a different track that is constructed around the theme of that stage. The overgrown forest stage is upbeat and cheerful, making you feel as if you're embarking on a fun adventure. Something I quite like about this one is the use of backing percussive instruments that almost sound like someone playing with wood. The damp and swampy mushroom stage sounds plucky, laid-back, and somewhat mysterious. The ice stage has a stronger focus on percussion, dreamy synths and pads, and the cold backing piano, and so on. When you enter the room with the idol to exchange hearts for Relics the music is serene, cheerful, and with an operatic backing; immediately leaving a mark on you as it's one of few times you hear a human voice. And when you enter battles, the music dynamically changes depending on the enemies encountered; sometimes adding sharply played strings, or harsher drums, or a rocking electric guitar, then going back to the usual song once the monsters are dead.

The game is extremely responsive on mouse and keyboard. There aren't many keys you have to juggle during your runs, and as I mention later on, all of the controls can be changed on PC. Although the game markets itself as a "twin-stick shooter" I found it much harder to play well on a controller, though that's more of a personal skill issue as I struggled similarly with Enter the Gungeon. Controllers are supported on PC and the buttons are relatively straightforward. Even so, I'd still recommend playing on PC with a mouse and keyboard as the extra control helped me go much further on my runs.

Despite all my praise, I must talk about one big issue I have with Revita. It is no fault of the visuals, or the music, or some kind of bug or glitch that I kept encountering, but instead the core gameplay loop. As I said at the start, Revita is unforgiving. Making hearts the main currency of the game once you are inside of a run means that if you do not play extremely well, you cannot obtain pickups or Relics—and on the other hand, if you invest too much in those items, you'll become a glass cannon that will inevitably shatter. In order to succeed in Revita, you must play and plan perfectly just to make it to the higher floors, and even then, you're still bound by luck because of how varied the Relics and their buffs can be. Meaning that in order to get a run bound for the ending, you must have the skill to avoid taking damage and build your max HP, know when to spend hearts on items and what items you should get, get good RNG on the items you can purchase or find, and master the patterns of every boss up to the final boss which can be over an hour into the run. Unlike Spelunky 2, which is a true and brutal roguelike that always kills you due to something out of your hands, failure in Revita is almost always your own. To a certain degree you can cope with the bad RNG or some missed boss patterns, but it's rarely enough to overcome what's expected of you. This is where the roguelite part of Revita comes into play, since the game only becomes easier the more time you put into it. But that is entirely my issue with it. The game should be the same whether you're playing it 5 hours in or 50, but that's demonstrably not the case. I have no qualms with the roguelite aspects, but making the entire system dependent upon health cripples the player's potential for upward momentum as one bad boss, purchase, or just plain RNG can ruin an entire run, and the only way to overcome this is essentially "spend more time in the meatgrinder."

I don't want to end this review on a negative, so I'll take a small section before the conclusion to praise the game for its settings and accessibility. There are no advanced options for graphics, but there are options for every other visual setting like bullet trails, blur effects, bloom, vignette, and so on. You can rebind all the keys and change default options like using the up key to interact with objects or locking your mouse to the window. But the true achievement of this game is its accessibility settings. There are options to decrease the game speed, turn off flashing lights, add aim assist, remove button mashing, use a normal HD font instead of a pixelated one, and so on. It's nothing incredible, but it's nice to see a game try to make itself more accessible to others… Even if the core gameplay loop is one of the most inaccessible out there.

In terms of morality, you can sacrifice your hearts to the image of a female idol in exchange for Relics, but it's never referred to as a goddess or deity. You use guns to shoot monsters with bullets. There is no language, no sexual content, and no gore or blood.

Revita is a beautiful and polished game that has true passion and talent behind every part of the experience, but some of its fundamental design decisions hold the game back from its true potential. I love this game, and I plan to put many more hours into it after this review, but I would only recommend it to someone who likes these types of games and enjoys seeing improvement solely through repetition. If you are that type of person, I highly recommend Revita.