Hey hey people. Lenny here.
Do you want to play a game where you commit war crimes? Shooting down an unarmed civilian, finishing him off and then disobeying orders by attacking your commanding officer?
If you answered yes, then you are sick. Or from the balkans. Or me.
Welcome to the Revenant Prince, a game that hammers into you the importance of being able to spare or execute your enemies… but doesn’t actually tell you what the consequences of that will be. You are a war criminal on the run, called Troy. In a world that’s a mix of the cutest ♥♥♥♥ ever and absolute grimdark, you are an edgy chad trying to understand what the ♥♥♥♥ is even going on all around you. Why do some people act like they’ve seen you before? Why do some npcs care about the amount of monsters you killed? How do they KNOW how many monsters you killed. Why is everyone making fun of your name? And most importantly – what’s this voice in your head that randomly stops time, says that life is suffering, gives exposition, judges your every major decision and commands you to kill certain people?
“Huh I can spare or execute people, there’s some cute stuff and a deep plot – is this an edgy undert-” Shut the ♥♥♥♥ up – no. I will make a few undertale jokes here and there, but comparing this game to undertale is unfair. Undertale brings a certain image to mind, which is different to different people. But none of these images fits what The Revenant Prince is all about. Undertale is a cutesy quirky game with weird game mechanics that can get deep and dark if you decide to pursue the darkness. In the revenant prince you don’t have weird rhythm mini-games as fight sequences. You don’t get a choice to talk instead of beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of your enemies. You just either execute or spare them and have changes in the game world depending on some kind of “morality” variable the game remembers. Closest comparison to undertale would be the behavior of certain shop npcs – in some shops npcs will refuse to make small talk or buy things from you if you kill one too many monsters. Also, the doggo won’t be nice to you – pet a husky doggo found in various towns to check how bad you are. Goodboys know who the badboys are.
Enemies can say a few things during battle. Usually beg for their life and tell you how terrible you are. Sucks to be you treant – I’m killing you off anyway.
But let’s explain the fighting mechanics a bit since they are a bit unusual.
You can have three weapons equipped at any time. They get a light, heavy and special attacks, bound to Q, W and E respectively. You switch weapons with A S D which select first, second or third weapon. You also have options for using an item, equipping a new weapon to one of the slots, sparing your enemy and escaping. You select between the options using up and down arrow keys… Yeah this gets real messy and confusing and I’m not finished. Each QWE attack give a different cooldown to your weapon and you can’t use any attack of that weapon in that time. You can however freely switch to a different weapon and fire another one up. So battles are like a fast-paced dance of a mad warrior who randomly grabs weapons around him to cause carnage. Speaking of carnage, you also have the R button. You don’t get it right away but you’ll know when you do. It’s a pretty OP skill that drains an additional special meter that appears on the upper right corner and replenishes with received damage. You need to press it twice to get the transformation, as if the game is asking you “are you sure you want to do this?” but when asked about the consequence of using it, the game stays silent, mocking the question. First press of the button still stops time and gives a small change to the protagonist’s appearance… his eye gets surrounded by a blue flame like SANS UNDERTALE THE C❤M REAPER! Ekhm. Yes, moving on. There is yet ANOTHER mechanic you need to watch for but usually can be ignored – durability. If you keep spamming light attacks of a weapon without switching, then the weapon won’t get enough time to ‘regenerate’ durability, forcing you to switch. A bit dumb but managable. In general battles are a mess, but a fast paced mess that I love. However, I’d be pissed if I was playing a mercy route – I basically only use the item option to heal but having to constantly switch between item and mercy while my enemies are still attacking(it isn’t turn based) it’d get annoying and confusing fast and I’d probably end up killing a few enemies by total accident. Also there are a few bugs in the battle system and game in general. In battle I got stuck because an enemy stunned my character while I my attack animation was playing and the game didn’t know how to resolve this, stunlocking me.
Save often in different slots because of such bugs – they are unavoidable but the game is worth playing despite themselves
Now to the dark elements. There is a reason I made a shelf called “Eldritch and Obscure” on my steam library. This ♥♥♥♥ has almost exclusively positive reviews, but there’s so few of them that steam doesn’t even calculate it as “overwhelmingly positive” or something like that, limiting reach. This is the kind of game that Sseth doesn’t review, Mandalore doesn’t review and the mass “gaming” ‘media’ absolutely wouldn’t touch. This is something Saint would review – he’s the kind of guy who fishes games out of… WAYBACK MACHINE and in a language he doesn’t understand. For fun. But compared to most such games, Revenant Prince is art. It’s Kino pure and simple. But it is a dark kino. The game is all about making moral choices and being forced to do the wrong thing yet keeping your humanity… or ultimately losing it. Starting your game for a second time you might be greeted not with the starting screen but a text box saying “You are only prolonging the inevitable. Give up.” or other such ominous ♥♥♥♥. When saving the game, anomalies will show up in your save files – distorted, black and white ghostly versions of the people you killed being showed as your “companions”. Sometimes you might get a random encounter that isn’t a battle, but a random ominous message like “You made your point”. I hopped right onto local files to see what’s inside. Games who do this thing often have gimmicks like making a .txt file with additional creepy ♥♥♥♥, changing your wallpaper, having folders upon folders filled with additional cryptic lore… but this game just has one single file – the .exe. Yes, just the .exe. Entire over gigabyte worth of a game on a single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ .exe as if they mocked you for expecting something in the folder, as if they wanted to troll you and give those datamining autists a challenge. I have no idea where the save files even are, but I’d use hex editors and all my occult knowledge to find even a small bit worth of this rabbit hole. Still, making a game this way is probably not the best idea programming-wise but I’m not knowledgeable enough to say what issues this might be causing.
I haven’t finished this game but I am absolutely fascinated by the lore, the dark aspects, the hidden messages, everything. I urge you to buy it – full price. It’s absolutely worth it.
10/10 would descend into madness again.