Mini Review: Revita (PS5) - The Ultimate Roguelite Experience

Revita is a 2D platforming roguelite twin-stick shooter from small indie developer BenStar. You play as a young blue-haired child, who awakens on the metro with no recollection of who they are. When leaving the train, you are faced with a long journey of self-discovery as you ascend an ominous clocktower in search of your lost memories. Along the way you will experience some very hard-hitting themes such as mental health issues, grief, depression, loss, and suicide.

The clocktower is split into several themed areas, each consisting of a total of 15 rooms and a challenging boss fight, based on the stages of grief. In typical roguelite style, 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. Each enemy not only has different movements and attacks but will also drop souls that’ll enable you to replenish your health.

Where Revita really shines is with its unique risk/reward mechanic, using health as the main currency. You’ll have to gamble with your life in the aim of becoming stronger. The items in Revita are so well designed that it makes you want to take every single one, however you must make sacrifices to survive. It really makes you stop and think through every decision carefully before committing to it: should you sacrifice three hearts for a 20 per cent damage increase? Should you open this chest for a single heart? Or should you just save your health for the boss fight ahead? Being greedy really doesn’t pay off here but managing your health correctly can be very enjoyable and is extremely satisfying when perfectly planned, leaving you within an inch from death.

You’ll be starting and ending each run in Memoria Station, which will become a bustling hub of activity as you progress and unlock new characters, weapons, items, and secrets. The vast array of unlocks and secrets in Revita is astounding.

It’s not only Revita’s design that shines here as the pleasing presentation polishes off this package perfectly. There's a simple but cutesy pixel art style and some gloriously relaxing background music, which will have you humming away even when not playing — it’s the complete package.

Revita is an easy to pick up but tough to master twin-stick shooter, presented with gorgeous visuals and catchy music. It’s addictive gameplay loop, balanced risk/reward mechanics, and abundance of content puts it in strong competition with the biggest and best in the genre (The Binding of Isaac, Dead Cells, and Enter the Gungeon) for the top spot.