Every now again when browsing an online game store you’ll see a game on sale for less than 2 dollars. Now if this game is part of a prominent series this very low sale price means that its trash. But sometimes the game is notably short, small-scale, and has reviews full of half-truths that trick you into playing a repetitive game that angers you and even though you uploaded two videos of yourself playing this game to Youtube you delete them because you’ll never finish. I bought Reventure for less than two bucks.
Now I have a slight…addiction to pixel art games. An average-looking hand-drawn platformer? Not for me. Same game but with pixel art? I’m all in. Because of this I end up buying games that I occasionally have to force myself to finish. Now that you know of my condition I can regale you with what transpired when I decided to purchase Reventure.
I was perusing GOG on this fateful day when I saw Reventure flashing on the homepage. I saw the pixel art but I still had to read the description to be sure. This game claimed to have 100 different endings, lots of humor, and a bunch of other stuff. So I bought it and proceeded to not play it for months. Later on I needed some gameplay for my Youtube and for some reason I chose installed this. Two 30-minute sessions later I was washing my hands of this game.
Before I get into the guts of why I’ll never play this game again, let me tell you how this game works. You play as a guy who needs to save the princess? I’m pretty sure it’s a princess. I just tried to boot the game up to double check and I got the white screen of death. I believe that’s a sign. Anyway you can jump, use a weapon, and I think there is another button for extra actions like placing bombs.
Now when this game said 100 different endings I thought they meant that it was quick to beat but all your decisions mattered. What they actually meant was that there are 100 ways to die. You walk up to a cat? Dead. You disrespect the king? Dead. You beat an enemy to death and keep swinging? Dead. Some of these are funny, some are irritating, all of them(at least the ones I got) make you start back from the beginning, which leads to my main problem with this game.
This is one of those “Every time you die you start back at the beginning with no significant progress achieved” games. It got old real quick. It especially got old for me when I realized that what I needed to do to get past a certain part would require a significant amount of traversing and level memory. Also items weigh you down, so when you pick more up, you can’t jump as high, and this locks off whole areas for you!
This game has a screen where it shows all the deaths you’ve unlocked, and the spaces for the ones you haven’t. Each of those empty spaces has the potential to ruin every successful run of the game. Now I’ll be honest, some of these deaths only trigger once. But some will always be on the table no matter what.
If I sat down and really dug my heels in I could probably beat this game in an hour. But between the restarts, oddly triggered deaths, and intense traversal I just don’t have the patience for it. And I would absolutely lose my mind if I got near the end but died cause I tripped over a rock or something. So to preserve what little sanity this game left me with, I’ll just stop playing.
