Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with an independently developed game – REDO! Robson Paiva, the man behind the title has clearly given his heart and soul to this metroidvania and made sure the game contains souls-like difficulty.
REDO! can be put under a lot of tags, but truly it’s a non-linear survival RPG game that is extremely open to exploration back and forth, but even more extreme in terms of difficulty. At one moment you will be fighting against 2 enemies and understanding their pattern, and right after you pat yourself in the back for making it out alive, you’re greeted with an extremely over-powered flame-throwing mob.
REDO! Is available for PC, PS4/5, Xbox Series X and Series S and Nintendo Switch. Courtesy of the publishers, we had the opportunity to review it for the Nintendo Switch.
Broken. Shattered. Searching for Hope.
Redo, visually, is instant love for everyone who has a heart for pixel graphics. The animations are fluid, the physics are smooth and the entire world design signifies the setting of the dystopian post-apocalyptic world. Being instantly attracted and building up the love at first sight feeling in my heart, I couldn’t wait to dive right in.
The protagonist is a woman who assumes that she is the only one alive after the entire apocalyptic incident happened, leaving only strange biomachines all over the world. But surprisingly, she receives an anonymous text, asking her to meet them at the top. While this may sound like a shocking and mysterious approach that sparks the hope that she isn’t the only one alive, I personally think the text couldn’t be more naïve, since everyone is dying and the world has drowned in rubble and debris.
In my personal spark of hope to expect solid combat, I fell into the world of dark souls all over again but much worse. The combat offers a slow heavy attack, roll and jump. There is no dodge or parry, which forces you to hold back and position yourself to attack almost any type of enemy.
This is absolutely fine until each enemy can tank almost 30% of your HP in one single hit. While you can only roll back, enemies can dash into you, and even leap onto you. And just to be clear, these are the enemy types you face at the start of the game and yes, the enemies grow harder, stronger and more diverse.
Talking about getting better, there is no healing until you reach specific checkpoints that are well apart from each other. Reaching these checkpoints will heal you, but instantly reset every single enemy you just killed. So, did you just clear an area and decided to heal before you go ahead? Well, good luck since you’re fighting them again. Thanks to the ability of the switch to pause the game when I am summoned to work because the lack of not being able to save your progress in a 2022 game is truly infuriating.
But when everything had started to look down, a spark of hope shone across my screen. And I died twice on my way towards it.
Worth the Effort?
But finally, I had it. The game offered me a secondary method for combat – Items. Starting with a riot shield. I could now shield myself against murderers who dash onto me with a knife and leave them stunned. This gave me an easy opening to kill them in a jiffy.
Feeling overpowered and full of might I found myself easily conquering the dark depths and environment that truly gave me some troubling thoughts when I went to sleep. I found more items, including Pistol, Assault Rifle and an RPG. All stronger than each other. However, these came with a limitation of usage and can only be filled back with enemy drops and checkpoints, pushing me to use these items only in times of crisis.
But as my enemy grew stronger and the platforming more confusing and the story being a complete lackluster apart from a few notes hidden away in corners, I started to lose hope again. Having to die with unfair enemy attacks and my character’s slow attacks and jumps made me even more cranky. While most games with high difficulty either train you to be skilled and really disciplined to fight against harder enemies, REDO! left me only helpless.
Continuing from checkpoints and REDOING all my tasks to die again before the checkpoint made me even sadder. But this is what the game offers and this maybe is the entire core experience of the game. So, I tried playing it at different times of the day. Right in the morning with a cup of coffee, or in the middle of the day after a cosy lunch. Sometimes I hid under the quilt at the midnight wishing to shout in rage. All I did was play REDO! hoping to find a good story, which I didn’t.
VERDICT
Overall, REDO! Is a beautiful-looking game, that truly teaches you survival in the harshest way possible. The setting plants a fear in your heart that may sometime make you question: what if you were there?
While the narrative is a complete bummer, you are offered an entire catalogue of enemy variety, each with a different way to fight and a different medium to kill. But it lacks in terms of the story, narrative or even the OST. The difficulty of the game will make many users look away since even after giving dedicated time, it is hard to progress in the game. The combat is a letdown, and you may need to progress further in the game to find extra collectables that will finally give you the edge, but until then, you will be repeating the death-parkour-checkpoint loop.
Disclaimer: The review code was provided by the publishers with no riders
Final Rating: AVOID