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Reverie is a Zelda-like adventure with New Zealand flair

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Reverie
• Developer: Rainbite
• Publisher: Eastasiasoft
• Switch, PS4, Vita

“Earthbound meets Zelda”. It’s really difficult to describe Reverie in any other way. You can dance around it, play up its New Zealand mythology, or use a phrase like “quirky top down action-adventure game” but the influences are worn very openly. Often imitated, but rarely replicated, invoking them means living up to a lot of people’s high expectations. So does Reverie clear the high bar it sets?

Maybe. Sorta?

Reverie doesn’t achieve anywhere near the same level of puzzle, world, or dungeon design of the series it cribs from, but it does have its own unique charm. Transplanting the framework of a fantasy adventure onto the domestic has a sort of eternal appeal, and in at least some part, Reverie captures that feeling of turning play sessions in the backyard into grand adventures.

Reverie is at its best when I’m fighting possessed washing machines and thwacking enemies with a yoyo. There’s still a playful novelty to seeing swords and arrows replaced with a cricket bat and nerf gun. The regional touches work add to this–being able to find a nest of Kiwi birds and add their lost feathers to your feather collection is genuinely cute.

Reverie kind of gets by on that novelty. From a formal standpoint, it’s uninteresting, rote even. It’s nowhere near as well constructed as its inspirations. Puzzles mostly involve pushing a box through obvious paths to press down a switch, only getting slightly more engaging when it asks you to do things like intentionally press the puzzle reset switch as part of the solution. Dungeons never really taxed me, aside from the bosses which tend to be slightly sloppy. Maybe the boss pattern is predictable, or the room is too big to easily track them–there’s a lot of small, obvious issues like that.

Outside the main town, the world map doesn’t have a great sense of geography either. Parts are a little too wide, or a little too narrow, and never have a sense of history or even connect in a fun puzzle box way. The same obvious logic found in the dungeons puzzles applies to the way areas connect, and even the winding paths I was sent through felt more like I was being sent the long way than properly exploring.

None of this makes Reverie unenjoyable. If anything, it lends Reverie a more casual, carefree attitude than other Zelda style adventures. The feeling I got most from Reverie is that the developers wanted to communicate “hey, we made a Zelda, isn’t that cool?” And, yeah, sometimes it is. It is cool.