REDO! Review (PS5)

At first glance, REDO! doesn’t promise too much. Its 16-bit graphics are cute, but we have already seen that on countless occasions. The story is nothing to phone home about. The game mechanics don’t bring anything new to the table. Yet, this game developed in three years by a single person, somehow overcomes its limitations and manages to be more than just the sum of its parts.

REDO! is not a stroll in the park by any means. The control is not the friendliest and the gameplay mechanics can be unforgiving. It is a Metroidvania style game, that will scare you like a true horror production. However, if you get past the initial frustration and manage to find that determination rivaling the one incited by the soulslike titles, you’ll start seeing REDO! with different eyes.     

The story is simple, yet functional. You are the last survivor on the planet, a lonely girl who has to face biomachines in a truly dystopian setting. In the middle of the despair caused by these less than friendly circumstances an unexpected message ignites hope in our lonely hero and sets her on quest embedded in an action game with plenty puzzles.

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The new hope raises new questions as well about your condition as the last survivor of humanity that will be answered as you make your way through the city in order to reach your designated rendezvous point. The trip will be frustrating and illustrates very well how people need every bit of their spirit in order to have a chance in front of the never tiring machines.

Due to its very high difficulty level REDO! is not for everyone. It is a game that will bring you to the edge of your patience and will frustrate you at almost every step. It requires you to learn the patterns of each and every enemy and even than you will have to have a perfect timing and reflexes. But since you are human and not a machine, be prepared to see the loading screen quite often.

Each time you fail you will be returned to the last save point you activated with HP, ammo and stamina fully charged. But this comes at a cost: all your opponents will be back in their places as well. And dealing again with all the machines will oscillate on a scale from angering to maddening.

The gameplay itself is simple: each of the machines you will encounter will have two values above their head showing their HP and their Stamina. If the latest is exhausted, they become stunned and if you manage to down them you will recuperate some HP. Besides checkpoints this is the only way to get back some of the health you will lose during the encounters.

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The difficulty level is not steep and lets you build up your confidence before tearing it up into small and meaningless pieces. After the first couple of scenes the different enemy types are mixed in a way to keep you on your toes and permanently force you switch up your tactics. The boss encounters will make you sweat and really get creative with what you have learned about the smaller, regular opponents.

Being a Metroidvania like title means that you will have plenty of routes to choose from, some hiding new and more powerful weapons. A novelty to this recipe is the fact that REDO! does not feature a map. You can either try to memorize the layout or draw it on a piece of paper. This adds extra frustration since the game structure requires you to backtrack a lot.

And if this would not have been enough already, some areas will question your sanity due to very cheap shots. Just there is no map, there are no environment prompts and the very well hidden traps can kill you instantly. If you fail to remember their location or you go by the trial-and-error method, you will not last long.

As said before REDO! has a 16-bit graphic, that looks decent, although the environments and the characters can look a bit simplistic. What is remarkable though is the fluidity of the animations, both for your hero and your enemies. You will die a lot from various reasons, choppy animations or imprecise jumps though will not be among them.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion