Plenty of video games include “risk vs. reward” mechanics, as the medium is largely differentiated from movies or television by centering player agency. The rogue-like subgenre in particular has a loop of repeating runs encouraging difficult design to overcome. Most offer players a randomized pool of items with varying benefits and detriments that create nigh-endless permutations of skills to learn, and many include challenge rooms or hidden content that offer more rewards and stat buffs. However, the upcoming indie game Revita stands out for building its entire conceit around gambling away one’s health.
Hit games such as Supergiant’s Hades save their deeper risk vs. reward systems for later. For example, the pact of punishment that unlocks after escaping Hades for the first time provides the opportunity to add layers of complexity and strip away previous benefits for additional rewards. In Revita, a platforming shooter developed by BenStar and published by Dear Villagers, players can immediately trade their hit points for mid-run upgrades and world progression, making things a balancing act at nearly every turn.
How Revita Turns Health Into Currency
The idea of a rogue-like allowing players to trade their health for goodies is nothing new; classics like The Binding of Isaac include similar mechanics such as “Deals with the Devil” that trade Isaac’s core red hearts for powerful items. However, Revita‘s take is interwoven into all its gameplay mechanics and underlying story. It follows an amnesiac child who wakes up on a metro train filled with spirits, and then helps restore the Memoria Station hub while climbing a mysterious clocktower to seek answers.
This tower features a series of procedurally generated single-room combat challenges, not unlike Flying Oak Games’ platformer rogue-like ScourgeBringer, and almost everything the child encounters costs health. Whether it be a shop, an angelic statue, or a chest locked in a separate room, health is a player’s only currency during runs. That makes it more imperitive players avoid taking damage from the game’s numerous monsters.
One interesting twist on the system is the multitude of ways that a player can both give up and restore their health. The aforementioned angelic statues offer increasingly powerful tiers of “Relics” if more hearts offered, but this only takes away the life within one’s health containers. Meanwhile, an NPC like the Blacksmith can trade half or full containers to upgrade items, decreasing one’s overall health pool. Luckily, players can make good on this trade-off by collecting shields that act as one-off hit points, and enemies drop soul energy that can restore health akin to Hollow Knight – or increase maximum heart containers when topped off.
Revita Wants to Crank Things Up to 11
Taken all together, Revita is a game about becoming a fine-tuned glass cannon by trading away one’s health for different items and further upgrading those items to fit specific niches. But that’s not all health can be used for, for example sometimes a player may put themselves at more of a disadvantage just to restore the spirit of a Memoria Station NPC trapped in the clocktower. During a showcase of the game at IndieLand 2021 last month, lead developer Benjamin Kiefer described their thought process being, “What if I take the rogue-like genre, the platformer genre, and amp up the risk/reward elements to 11 and make it so everything in the game is controlled by health management.”
Revita released via Steam Early Access in March 2021, and since then has seen a number of updates – the most recent of which being the Bait & Switch update on August 26. At IndieLand, a charity event run by Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil’s company That One Video Gamer to raise money for dementia research, a free demo released that will be available until October 8. The demo is worth trying for rogue-like fans, as Revita‘s all-encompassing risk vs. reward system is as engaging as its pixel art style.
Revita is available now on Steam Early Access.
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