Revertia (Review)

Anyone who thinks I’m just looking for attention when I don’t like games like Hollow Knight or Cuphead, you really should go look at how many puzzle games I review. It’s a lot. And trust me, I don’t do it for the page views. Even when I covered one that paid homage to 80s slasher films, where you solved puzzles by splatter-killing teenagers, nobody read it. But remember, puzzle games are people too.

Well, actually no I guess. They’re games, not people.

So uh..

Yea, I bought this game for my Switch called Revertia. It’s a platform-puzzler (a pluzzleformer? Admit it, that has a ring to it) with the hook being the “action” is based around the 1880s board game Reversi. Which you might also know as “Othello” if you bought it in the United States or Japan, because that’s the name Milton Bradley released it under. Fun fact: you owe your Nintendo Switch, and actually the video game industry as a whole, to Othello. Because Hiroshi Yamauchi was a personal fan of the game and one of the reasons Nintendo got into the home video game market is because Yamauchi was convinced a video game version of it, which would eliminate the slowness of playing with physical chips, would be a big hit. So first they made an arcade game for parlors in Japan, and then transferred it to a stand-alone home console. I personally think Othello is boring as fuck, but hey, thanks Othello!

I grew up in a different era but I still love the clunkiness of those old-timey stand alone consoles. They look so 1930’s idea of futuristic.

But, while I’m not a fan of the classic board game, the novel idea of turning its play mechanics into a platformer certainly caught my attention. It sounds inspired. The idea is basically if you turn a block black, if there’s another black block in the same line as it, all the blocks between them will also turn black. If you turn it back to white, they’ll all turn white again. If an enemy is in the path of the blocks being changed, it dies. It’s simple, like the board game. Here, the black blocks can be used as platforms to jump on, and the object is simply to get to the door. It sounds like a cool idea.

But, Revertia is, without hyperbole, the easiest puzzler I’ve ever played in seven years being Indie Gamer Chick. The thirty levels you’re given here are so toothless that I rechecked the title’s marketplace page to make sure I didn’t accidentally buy a game that was designed specifically for young children. That’s not a joke or something I added to this review for comic effect. I really did, because it was so absurdly easy. Apparently Revertia wasn’t made specifically for a young age set. But that’s the only group I think would get enjoyment out of it. I’d say beating stages in it is like shooting ducks in a barrel, but in this case the ducks are dying from self-inflicted gunshots.

I suspect this is one of those instances where the developer planned out elaborate steps that a player would go through to beat stages. But even deep into the thirty stages I was able to clear stages in a matter of seconds with literally no challenge by just placing one or two blocks and having a clear path to the door. It almost felt like the game was still trying to do tutorial things for most of the levels, with maybe two or three stages at most necessitating me to stop, scope out my surroundings, and then start to make my way to the door. ONE stage out of thirty I died on because I made a mistake plotting my course, and two other times I died because the controls are a bit unresponsive and it took me too long to highlight which block I wanted to change colors. One challenging level in thirty, and it wasn’t even the last level. I’ve been more puzzled by how to open shipping containers than I was at any point in Revertia. It does keep track of how many moves you’ve taken per stage (but doesn’t tell you the MINIMUM number of moves needed, which defeats the point) and the time you’ve taken, but without online leaderboards, what’s the point?

I didn’t like the game due to the utter lack of challenge, but I’ve always dug the “drawn with a pen” look. I wish more developers would do it. Just not too much you know. If it becomes over-saturated, I don’t want to get blamed for it.

Let’s not completely poo-poo the idea though. While Revertia completely fails to challenge, I think there’s a good idea in here somewhere. I’ve always dug the “make your own platforms” puzzle platform thing, like Solomon’s Key or Escape Goat. Revertia just really needed more time to cook. It feels like it was rushed out the door. I hope PLiCy continues to develop stages for it. The Revertia you can buy on Switch right now feels like a really good proof of concept that should never have been released in the state it’s in. It needs the controls smoothed out and the challenge significantly ramped-up. I do believe this is a good idea for a game, but a good idea doesn’t become a good reality unless you take the time to refine it. So I issue this challenge to PLiCy: take one year to build this game back up with new, more challenging stages and more responsive controls. The idea is a winner. The current product? Not so much.

Revertia was developed by PLiCy
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$4.99 hope the developer REVERSIes this review with some new levels that challenge in the making of this review.