The Ultimate Roguelite Experience: Revita (PS5)

In Revita, you play a young blue-haired child who wakes up on the metro with no memory of who they are. BenStar’s 2D platformer is a roguelite twin-stick shooter. After leaving the train, your quest for lost memories begins as you ascend an ominous clocktower. In this book, you’ll experience emotional issues like mental health, grief, depression, loss, and suicide.

Each themed area in the clocktower includes 15 rooms and a boss fight, based on the grievance stages. You are presented with procedurally generated rooms and floors filled with a variety of interesting creatures, slimes, maggots, flies, cultists, frogs, bees, mushrooms, and ducks. In addition to different attacks and movements, enemies also drop souls that replenish your health.

Revita’s unique risk/reward mechanic, which uses health as the main currency, really shines. To become stronger, you must gamble with your life. Revita has such well-designed items that you wish to take them all, but you need to sacrifice. You have to think about every decision carefully before making it: should you sacrifice three hearts for 20 percent more damage? Can you open this chest to get a single heart, or should you save your health for the boss fight? Greed does not pay off here, but managing your health correctly is very rewarding and satisfying when done perfectly, leaving you almost dead.

You’ll start and end each run in Memoria Station, which will become a bustling hub of activity as you unlock new characters, weapons, items, and secrets.

As well as Revita’s design, the pleasing presentation completes this package. Pixel art style and soothing background music will have you humming even when not playing — it’s a perfect package.

A twin-stick shooter with gorgeous visuals and catchy music, Revita is easy to pick up but hard to master. With its addictive gameplay loop, balanced risk/reward mechanics, and abundance of content, it competes with the best in the genre (The Binding of Isaac, Dead Cells, and Enter the Gungeon).

Pros:

  • Plays addictively.

  • Variety of content.

  • Great risk/reward mechanics.

  • Secret unlocks.

  • Gorgeous music.

  • A cute pixel art.

Cons:

  • Repeated room designs.

I scored 9 over 10 in this game.

Author: Maricel Cuico