"You shouldn't have come, little one. Every time you die and wake up on that metro, there's a little less of you and a little more of me. Distressing, isn't it?"
— Enigma
Revita is a Roguelike action-platformer developed by Benjamin "BenStar" Kiefer. The game follows an amnesiac kid who finds themselves climbing a mysterious, constantly shifting clocktower. Every failure has them wake up back on the metro constantly traveling to the tower, yet they try again and again, only driven by the desire to keep going and find some answers.
The tower has many relics and upgrades to be had throughout its floors, as well as merchants peddling relics of their own. However, the player must sacrifice their health if they want to obtain relics to increase their power and be mindful while doing so, lest overconfidence lead them to an early death. With careful management of their life and the focusing of their defeated enemies' souls to heal, they will empower their weapon enough to climb through the tower's many dangers and possibly reclaim the memories they lost along the way...
The game released on Steam in Early Access on March 3rd, 2021 and reached 1.0 on April 21st, 2022. It can be found here
and for the Nintendo Switch right here.
Revita provides examples of:
- Achievement System: Early in the game, you unlock the ability to earn Secrets through the Caretaker at the tree in Memoria Station. Through completing these, the player can earn more Imprisoned Keys to unlock more relics with, and more blueprints to unlock more helpful rooms and abilities for each run.
- Achievement Mockery: There are three notable ones: One for exiting a room without picking up a pickup, one for dying to your own explosions, and one for getting nothing out of a vending machine 3 times in a row (the icon for which depicts a vending machine getting kicked out of frustration).
- Amnesiac Hero: The player character knows nothing about what they went through before reaching the clocktower, only that they must find answers somewhere at the top of it.
- And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: Some secrets, mainly tied to completing certain levels of Lucent Shards, reward blueprints that just provide decorations for the station and provide no gameplay benefit.
- Anti-Frustration Features: There are many accessibility options that you can change to fit the game to your needs, such as changing the game's speed, reducing the damage the player takes, marking the player character and the enemies with colored outlines, and more.
- Anti-Hoarding: Played with for keys; having a lot of them lowers your chances of getting more, yet having none increases your chances and can guarantee at least one appears in a shop. Even funnier, there's an achievement for getting 10 of them.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Regret is vastly bigger than the player, so much so that they take up nearly the entire screen when up close.
- Bee Afraid: One area modifier will give a chance of rooms spawning Beyes, a bee with a drill-like stinger that lunges towards the player and tends to get stuck in the walls and floors. Then there's the secret second area, the Hollow Hives, which has a plethora of bee themed enemies.
- BFS: The Sword of Leo, a celestial weapon that deals decent damage to any enemies in its path, as well as destroying any enemy bullets it hits. Said sword is about 1.5 times as tall as the player character.
- Blackout Basement: Area modifiers can sometimes cause certain rooms to be filled with darkness, reducing your vision. This can also be applied to every room should you get afflicted with the Blindness curse.
- Boss Subtitles: Each of the main bosses have one, with extra flair for Disc-One Final Boss Acceptance and True Final Boss Mother, whose titles take up the whole screen.
- Bottomless Magazines: Comes as standard with each of the player character's main weapons; you can keep holding the trigger and not have to worry about ammo or reloading at any point. It gets lampshaded by the Dummy at one point.
- But Thou Must!: After beating Acceptance until you reach shard 5, you don't get a choice about whether or not you sit on the throne and become Acceptance yourself. Possibly Justified, as it's implied that Revita Kid is Not Himself during that moment.
- Cast from Hit Points: One of the game's core mechanics. If you want to get relics to upgrade yourself beyond the plentiful but individually small pickups, you'll have to find mother statues, shops, or chests, all of which demand a certain amount of your HP as currency. In addition, there's also the blacksmith met in the metro at the end of each area. He'll be able to upgrade the bonuses given by your relics, though at the expense of your max HP instead.
- Challenge Run: Beating a run for the first time earns you your first Lucent Shard. Activating these before a run increases the difficulty incrementally, where you can earn the next shard and keep making the game even harder.
- Chest Monster: There's a chance of a green, blue, or red chest being a mimic in disguise, with the rarer the chest the enemy mimics determining how strong it is (and how good the relic gotten from beating it will be). There's a curse to make mimics more common while also having a chance to drop no relic when defeated, and an item to make mimics more common and to drop two relics when defeated.
- Choose a Handicap: With the "Cursed Choice" upgrade, whenever you would be inflicted with a curse, you get to choose between two of them instead of it being chosen for you randomly. Can be indispensable on runs with high Lucent Shard counts, as they can come with modifiers that make more relics corrupted or even make you start the run with them.
- Comeback Mechanic: Some relics are focused around helping you recover from really bad situations, some of which are the Emergency Syringe, Life Vest, and the Devil's Pact.
- Cosmetic Award:
- Progessing far enough through the game will eventually let you unlock hats to put on the player character. They provide no gameplay benefit, they're just there to make you look nice.
- There's also the Golden Guns, which applies a permanent golden tint to any gun variant you beat Shard 30 with, but are otherwise no different than what you used to get them.
- Crosshair Aware: Many attacks in the game, typically from bosses or very dangerous enemies, are indicated with red lines or zones that indicate where an attack is going to land, or where an enemy is going to move themselves after burrowing or teleporting.
- Content Warnings: Booting up the game each time gives you a warning that this game deals with Grief, Loss, Mental Health issues and suicide.
- Damage Over Time: A staple of some of the relics, which allow you to inflict Status Effects like poison, burn, or electrocution. The Worn Out Glove relic also applies this to freezing.
- Death Is Cheap: No matter how many times they die, the player character always finds themselves back on a train to Memoria Station, where they can take the train back to the clocktower to try again. Played for Drama and even Played for Horror in later parts of the story.
- Determinator: The description for the basic soul gun states it was "manifested through your will to keep going", showing how strongly the player character feels about climbing the clocktower.
- Difficult, but Awesome: The Rocket Launcher weapon fires explosive bullets that damage any enemy in a sizable radius… which can include yourself if you stand too close, dealing a full heart of damage.
- Double Unlock: Unlocking new relics are twofold: finding the Imprisoned Key corresponding to it (either through enemy random drops or through Secrets at the caretaker), and bringing the key to the Imprisoned where you can unlock them for soul coins.
- Eldritch Location: The clocktower, with its ever-shifting layout between runs and the fact that it's situated on top of floating rocks.
- Equipment Upgrade: The blacksmith met at the end of normal areas lets you upgrade most relics, increasing the stat bonuses they give and generally increasing their effectiveness, provided you have the heart containers or, if you're lucky, a Relic Hammer.
- Final Boss Preview: The Enigma you fight as part of the tutorial is the very same Enigma that you fight as a Final Boss, where they understandably have a much stronger and faster moveset than last time. Granted, they're only the Pre-Final Boss next to the real final boss, Acceptance… and then you learn that Acceptance is actually just the Disc-One Final Boss.
- Fishing Minigame: One of the NPCs you can save unlocks fishing by the pond. You can catch a variety of fish (or hook new lures with different stats for fishing) and then sell the fish to the NPC for soul coins.
- Five Stages of Grief: The bosses are named after each of the stages, going in the traditional order. At the top of the tower, you face Enigma seemingly as the Final Boss, breaking the naming convention of the earlier bosses… until you realize that they weren't the final boss; that would be Acceptance.
- Give Me Your Inventory Item: The Technician, met at the start of each area after the first, offers to build you portals that give you shortcuts in exchange for soul coins, materials, and the Memento of the previous area's boss.
- The Goomba: Fleyes and their variants have one strategy that boils down to "fly towards you and hopefully bump into you".
- Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Scorpio Hook lets you zip into any surface it hits, while also giving you invincibility the whole way.
- Ground Pound: The Taurus Boots make you drop from the air to hit enemies on the ground, dealing more damage the longer the fall.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: At the end of the tutorial, you fight an Enigma that is very weak compared to when you face them as a Final Boss. Too bad that when you get them down to their second phase, they resort to an attack that chains you in place and completely stops you from doing anything, at which point you're guaranteed to die and be sent to the hub for the first time.
- King Mook:
- Speaking to the hero NPC at the beginning of an area will place an encounter with a miniboss in one of the area's floors. Said miniboss is an enlarged version of the Mooks from the current area, with increased health, speed, and more dangerous attacks compared to their regular counterparts.
- One of the area modifiers for Hollow Hives makes a miniboss spawn.
- Luck Manipulation Mechanic: A few relics and permanent upgrades allow you to reroll shop offerings, either by shooting the item or by spending health at a sign, respectively.
- Luck Stat: One of your stats, obviously enough. Having a large bonus in it positively influences a lot of factors, such as improving relics with on-chance activations, finding pickups, whether relics can be blessed, and so on. Of course, this also works against you if it goes into the negative.
- Macrogame: The soul coins and materials earned from each boss can be used to unlock more relics at the Imprisoned, or build more special rooms and unlock passive abilities that help in subsequent runs.
- Metal Slime: Greedlings are uncommon enemies that fit the bill: runs away when attacked or approached, drops a ton of pickups as they're damaged, and disappears if not killed fast enough.
- Mirror Boss: Acceptance takes the form of an ethereal silhouette of the player character, and their moveset revolves around empowered versions of the celestial weapons you've already used, with occasional usage of the main soul gun for good measure.
- Monster Compendium: Freeing the Librarian lets you look at a bestiary of every enemy you've encountered, as well as descriptions and health values if you kill a certain amount of each one.
- No Name Given: The player character is colloquially known as "Revita Kid", yet there's no indication of what their real name is or if they even have one.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Most things associated with being cursed, like enemies or relics, are given a glitchy, static-like effect to indicate their corruption.
- Pinball Projectile: The Virgo Staff shoots orbs of energy that bounce off any surface and damage any enemy they hit.
- Power at a Price: You'll occasionally come across a relic that is especially powerful at the point of the run you're at, but it will have a glitchy effect and be labelled as "corrupted". Taking this relic will inflict you with a curse, a penalty that sticks with you for the run and can have all sorts of effects ranging from making enemies show up as silhouettes to taking away your ability to heal through focusing unless you're in a room with enemies.
- Pre-Final Boss: Revita has two examples.
- In the fifth area, the unbeatable tutorial boss Enigma seemingly returns to act as the final boss, breaking the naming convention of all the previous bosses being named after the first four of the Five Stages of Grief. Except that upon beating Enigma, you're met with the actual final boss, Acceptance.
- However, when playing a 5 Lucent Shard run or higher, there is a sixth area with a new final boss, Mother. Except, after beating three phases of increasing difficulty, the kid is then taken to the True Final Boss: Regret.
- Purple Is Powerful: Anything corrupted is associated with purple, to indicate how much more dangerous they are than anything else.
- Quest for Identity: The player character wakes up in the metro with no recollection of their name or who they were, and the only thing they know is that the key to remembering what they lost lies somewhere in the clocktower that the metro leads to.
- Recoil Boost: One of the more useful advanced movement techniques is that firing your gun at the same time as you jump gives you a significant boost in height, letting you reach platforms that are way higher than normal. There's even a note at Memoria Station labelled "Reaching places you probably shouldn't be able to reach 101" that spells it out for you.
- Shout-Out: Some of the relics are references to other indie games in both appearance and function:
- The Winged Strawberry boosts your stats as long as you don't dash.
- The Shade Cloak lets you damage enemies by dashing through them.
- Tri Ragnarok, which hits one enemy with a BFS for lots of damage after enough enemies are killed.
- Save Scumming: Actually Downplayed. When autosaving was added, you can only do it once.
Word of God confirms that this is to prevent Save Scuming. - Story Breadcrumbs: The majority of the plot is only revealed to the player through the Lost Notes they find throughout the tower, often after fulfilling certain conditions like beating runs on higher Shard levels.
- Shadow Archetype: Revita Kid gets two:
- Acceptance, who is the more traditional Shadow, likely more an Enemy Without than an Evil Doppelgänger thanks to their description, saying that "only the strongest people can stare into the face of our own failures and not get crushed under the weight", their dialog, along with the fact that Revita Kid later hugs them, uniting to get to The Last Refuge.
- Mother is The Unfettered to Revita Kid's The Fettered. Mother was willing to do anything to "get out" of the clocktower, including cutting off her left ear. Revita Kid has to balance sacrificing their health for relics, and keeping their health. But Mother? When you fight her, she uses everything she had just to fight you, going so far as to break the machine's power that keeps her in stasis. Both are Determinators, but Mother takes it more steps further than Revita Kid ever does. It's even lampshaded by the Caretaker at one point.
- Turns Red: Every boss enrages on reaching half health, where they perform a specific barrage of attacks and potentially gain new ones. Except Acceptance, who turns more gray than red.
- The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Last Refuge, only accessible after obtaining the Strange Key and using it to unlock the door with the heart-shaped lock in Ticking Tower Top at least once, itself only possible on Shard 5 or above.
- Video Game Dashing: The Kid has a dash that lets them dodge any damage for its duration, at the cost of needing to recharge for a split second each time.
- Wall Jump: A staple of movement, allowing you to carefully maneuver around enemies and their bullets with the right usage.
