Reventure

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Reventure is a Puzzle-Platformer with a refreshingly unique approach to the genre. While in other games you collect gold or items, in Reventure you collect unique deaths.

The game starts with one of the most time-worn concepts in videogames – you have been summoned to the castle, where the king will plead with you to go off and rescue the princess, telling you to get a sword and shield. However, you don’t need to do any of that. Heck, you don’t even need to meet with the king. Maybe you’ll duck out the back door and explore the countryside, or hop over the castle and dive into the horde of monsters. The game is very flexible with how you approach it.

As you explore the world, you’ll come across chests that contain special items, but you won’t necessarily want to get each one you find – the more stuff you have, the more you’re weighed down and the less mobility you have. And eventually, inevitably, you’ll reach an obstacle that will simply kill you. However, that’s not where the story ends, that’s just the start of a new chapter.

See, each unique way your character dies in Reventure triggers a new twist in the story. Maybe you got a teddy bear of love and jumped toward a castle guard only to impale yourself on his spear. You’ll start over, being told that’s okay, you never had a heart any way. Go back with a sword and kill that guard? You’ll be executed for your crime, and your next attempt will be as the first guy’s brother. Go pet a cat and doom yourself to a life as a crazy cat person? In your next life, you’ll play as one of those cats looking to save the world in his stead.

The strange twists and turns this game’s story takes are one of the biggest reasons to play it, and soon enough you’ll be paying attention not only for new items to gather and new paths to explore, but also for new and interesting ways to die. The game logs them into a scrapbook of sort after each attempt, and there are 100 possible “endings” to collect.

Before long, doing so becomes an interesting puzzle of sorts. Do you grab the sword and the shovel this time, or skip those and try to get the lava trinket? What happens if you go to the dragon while holding this item? Each play through you’ll likely get more ideas for things to try out the next time, and discovering the different ways to interact with this game can be quite a joy.

It’s not without some frustrations, though. As much as it’s clearly a part of the necessary gameplay loop, it’s frustrating to have to start from square one every time you die and work your way through all the items you collected and get back to where you were if you want to try something slightly different.

As for the presentation, this game is okay, but nothing special. The pixel art graphics get the job done, but don’t do anything particularly interesting or memorable, and the game’s soundtrack is pretty forgettable too. Thankfully the writing for this game is absolutely delightful, and really does a great job selling the humor, picking up the slack in the personality department that the other areas of the game lack.

All told, Reventure is an inspired approach to Puzzle-Platformers that rethinks some of the core elements of the gameplay and turns them on their head, making dying in the game not only something that’s not to be avoided, but a large part of the whole point of the game, and this is paired with a wonderful sense of humor that just makes you want to see more. And while the game’s visuals and sound don’t really do anything thrilling, and a few gameplay elements can be a bit frustrating, overall this is a unique and wonderful experience that fans of the genre should definitely give a try.

tl;dr – Reventure is a Puzzle-Platformer where you’re basically trying to find all the different ways to get your character killed. It’s clever, delightfully funny, and has a unique approach to puzzles that really makes you think through how to do things differently after each death. It’s not without some frustrating issues, but on the whole this is a wildly original game well worth playing.

Grade: B+

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