One of my most anticipated indie games from 2023 and I finally got to finish it a couple days ago. TEVI is a really solid and satisfying metroidvania + bullet hell mix that will be sure to please any newcomers to this type of game.

But I have to admit, it's not quite ~as~ good as Rabi-Ribi. It's an ambitious game for sure, I do have to respect the amount of effort they put into making a large story full of lore and complete voice acting (with recognizeable japanese talents, even!), but the cliched nature of the many directions the story takes and mixed tones do hold it back from making it a special experience. Thankfully the characters are all fun and likeable, really carries the story for the most part.

This new direction just doesn't feel quite as earnest and niche as Rabi-Ribi was. Just feels very held back, almost as if they're to please a different crowd altogether. Feels pretty clear considering the overall gameplay feels a lot more accessible/easier on normal difficulty and even the localization style feels like it's trying to be more mainstream.

But honestly, these might just be personal nitpicks. Rabi-Ribi is a very special game for me and I was hoping this one would capture that same magic. But that doesn't mean it's a bad game! It's fantastic and i'm sure anyone going into blindly will find it more enjoyable than I have.

The level design is still pretty top notch, boss fights are as awesome as ever, OST is top tier and the character designs are a good mixture of cool and cute. I explored 100% and found 80% of every item in the game, did all sidequests and experienced most of the boss rush modes after the endgame and it all feels worthwhile. I might even return it for more playthroughs on higher difficulties.

I highly recommend it!

Tevi is a great metroidvania in its own right, with strong level design and great combat. But the game's much greater focus on story did not do it any favors. Every boss and ability is locked behind plot progression, which resulted in a very linear experience, with little-to-no sequence breaking, and unrewarding backtracking. Worst of all, it wasn't even worth it as the story is so thoroughly unengaging it's unreal, tanking the game's pacing with copious amounts of infodumps.

It's pretty tough to follow up an act as phenomenal as Rabi-Ribi, but Tevi sure did try.

Substandard plot with lackluster Metroidvania progression heavily-carried by its charming art design and its wonderful combat mechanics + bosses.

As much as I enjoyed the game's combat and very-flexible Kingdom Hearts 2-esque badge system where you can spend 'skill points' in order to slot them in, and the game isn't shy about giving you more skill points than what you really need, the metroidvania exploration kills most of the game's momentum for me as well as its lackluster story which is your standard fare anime plot.

I'm not really fond of writing reviews about something shelved unless I need to make a note to come back to it for technical reasons at some point, because I would honestly like to finish a game before writing up a full commentary of thoughts on it (or any witty zingers, were I able to muster any).

I think it's worth talking about TEVI (it's in all-caps on Steam, so that's how I'm going to refer to it) because I got deep into the fifth chapter (out of eight, I think?) and put 15 hours in already.

The difficult part about talking about TEVI is that there are really only two ways for me to talk about it:

1. Pretend like I've never played Rabi-Ribi (and pretend like I didn't see the cameo appearances of Erina and Ribbon or the Rabi Smash game in the back end of my playthrough)

2. Compare this game to Rabi-Ribi and expect some of the best exploration-based design in the history of Metroidvanias.

Well, I guess there's option 3: Why not both?!

Let me get the good out of the way: If you enjoyed the touhou aspect of bosses from Rabi-Ribi, you're not going to be disappointed here because the boss fights are easily the best part of the game. I didn't get to measure the differences in difficulty to see how vastly the bullets are applied over any given boss fight, but I'll always offer a shout-out when a game decides to modify difficulty based on actually affecting interaction and not just adding extra health, armor, or whatever. I played on Normal, I died a couple times, it felt like an okay difficulty, take that as you will.

The soundtrack is also pretty solid in some spots (I absolutely love the opening and Morose Town). Most stuff was fine and I think the soundtrack might be on par with Rabi-Ribi.

The game is huge, which I was rather expecting. I wasn't expecting that I'd only have 56% map coverage by the back end of Chapter 5, though. But also, this is where I need to bring up some gripes.

First, regarding level design: TEVI does something interesting with its room designs that I had to note, even if I absolutely don't like it -- there's almost always one-way paths forcing you in a direction away from the exploration that you're probably used to doing while playing a Metroidvania and these one-way paths often require you to go through some very roundabout traversing to get back onto what seems like the regular route you're taking. What makes this interesting is that this one-way funneling IS the regular route and is often the quickest way to the boss / next area while also showing you a significant amount of the area you're in. It's fascinating because you're getting probably over 50% of the map for the area completed just by being forced down these windy paths, but the act of being forced/corralled/funneled just leaves you feeling like you're not really that much in control of your movement through these areas. It's like a busted escalator that you can't go back up and you can't jump over the sides, either -- get to the bottom and see what's coming!

Some of the one-way pathing is peculiar because there are blocks you can occasionally bomb, but some blocks that look exactly the same can also just crumble and cause you to lock into an animation that looks like you stumbled as you fall through them slowly to the next room. Sometimes, you can just touch a crumbling block and move past it without falling in. Sometimes, you just get locked into it and you're going to the next level down and working your way around to the next big moment. Sometimes, you can get into that seeming funnel and work your way out of it, only to find yourself going back up to the exact same spot, with you probably opening up a shortcut back to the area you started from, with the notion that you never would have been able to continue in that direction if you had wanted to go your own way. The game has determined that YOU WILL GO SEE OUR BIG STORY DEAL THAT WE WANT TO SHOW YOU. YOU MUST. BY ANY MEANS.

I love exploration and solid bosses, so that's probably why I'm drawn to Metroidvanias (and Souls-likes). Exploration is paramount to me, with the more options available equating to a better experience overall. Rabi-Ribi gave me this in a way that few Metroidvanias (I'm also looking at you, Environmental Station Alpha!) ever have. So, it's with great disappointment that I share how very little there is in the way of enjoyable exploration in TEVI.

I mentioned the whole thing about the story by any means necessary, and I wasn't joking -- your gating abilities are locked behind storyline moments or areas leading to the next storyline beat. And not only are they locked behind those moments and beats, the game will go out of its way to let you know in multiple ways. In some instances, the game will actively tell you that you don't need to go somewhere right now if you try and take a path that's open to you (at first, I thought this was just because of the merchant conversation in the Prologue, but it happens with multiple areas throughout the game). In other instances, if you try to go into an area that's in the same direction as the story marker on your map, you'll get a warning that if you go into that area, you won't be coming out for a while and that you better prepare yourself. Not really sure what preparation entails, because crafting is silly in this game and healing items are one of the few things that don't really take much effort to craft. More on that later. But in one other way worth noting, should you decide that you want to go exploring with any newfound power-ups you have to check out places you haven't been yet, you will generally find yourself stuck and unable to progress further until you have YET ANOTHER story-based ability that you're likely missing. And if you're like me and went back to the first area of the game after every new ability you got, then you're also probably like me and gave up after you got multiple bombing and movement abilities and had come back FOUR TIMES without being able to get back up to the area where you started. And nearly every new area is like this even when backtracking to them after getting an upgrade, you'll just make a tiny bit more headway than before and be stuck all over again. No bosses (I don't count the Elite Battle challenges given by a particular NPC as a side quest among these), no neat looping back between areas by linking multiple places together in unrealized ways, no cool power-ups (maybe a random stat potion or a sigil if you're lucky). If this were one of my first Metroidvanias, this kind of thing wouldn't bother me but when I heard about this game being made after playing through Rabi-Ribi's POST-POST-POST GAME, I expected the kind of loose and wild craziness of a game that absolutely understood just how much you could break it while still being able to move around it freely if you just understood the mechanics well enough. TEVI is the exact opposite of that.

I mentioned crafting briefly and the sigils in this game are very much in the same vein as the badges from Rabi-Ribi. Some sigils are found in plain sight, some are hidden in rooms on maps, some are purchased with a limited money resource (money is found through destruction of certain blocks and is never dropped by monsters), and some are crafted via elementals and essences. Some of your other orbitar (little shooty-assist-things for a spoiler-free description) upgrades and some of the abilities themselves can be upgraded through crafting. How do you get resources? Kill enemies, hope they drop what you need, and if they don't, spend nine of one resource to get two sets of three of another elemental or essence resource and hope you get what you need. This whole system feels like an afterthought because you're given the ability to wade through enemies in hopes of getting what you need and just gambling for less resources if things don't go your way. It's padding that could have been usefully spent searching for those same sigils and ability upgrades as drops in some of those paths that you just were never allowed to go further down until you have every ability in the game. There was a real chance to put some real rewards down alternate paths of exploration and instead, you're just killing enemies and praying to the loot gods that you inevitably get what you need after a time. I don't like crafting in games where it feels like it's shoehorned in and this seems excessively so, especially since they let you burn resources to try and RNG your way to more resources.

I forgot in the midst of my rant on exploring (I'm not going back up to reinsert this!) that the worst offender for how the world design is set up is the Freeroam Mode. This is an option you can enable when starting a game that lets you skip the story entirely and gives you a move that Erina from Rabi-Ribi initially had that allowed you to sequence break into areas you couldn't reach previously. This mode originally wasn't available until you beat the game, but I'm guessing after some push-back about the lack of functional exploration with gating abilities from reviewers, it was patched to become unlocked at the start. I've seen arguments that the level system (experience is given through exploration and beating bosses, I believe) and the limited supply of coins and occasional sigil or stat-boosting potion make up for the fact that you're constantly only able to make slight headway further into these areas you're retracing your steps back to, but these arguments also seem to come from people who are playing on the highest difficulties and found themselves needing every edge to compete with the bosses. It's an argument I understand, but I don't think it justifies the stilted exploration experience, especially if Freeroam Mode is a thing in the first place.

I haven't really talked about the story and that's because since I didn't finish it, it's hard to really comment on how it all fleshed out without being speculative. I'll say that the all social and political commentary feels VERY heavy-handed, but that didn't really bother me -- your mileage may vary.

I feel like there was more I wanted to talk about, but I've been writing this for way too long instead of actually playing more games. Even though this game is lukewarm for me due to design decisions, I'm kinda all for supporting these devs and hoping the next game feels more fun (for me). Also, UP+DASH in the air is the most unintuitive choice ever for making a down-smash attack with the spanner weapon. WHY?!

If you read this far, you're obligated to go buy Rabi-Ribi and then either give this dev the equivalent money for TEVI and not play it or buy it and then tell me how wrong or right I am later. I just needed to rant and ranting to my spouse and friends about this wasn't enough. Rant over, get it on sale next summer when Steam inevitably has a sale with it at 50% off. It's still better than your average Metroidvania just for the bosses alone, despite all my disappointment with it. I hope to maybe decide to come back and finish it eventually.

buen gameplay, el resto cringe. Tevi es una copia exacta de Rabi Ribi pero con cosas mucho más pulida, más ambicioso y con más presupuesto

lo único negativo que podría decir que me resulto mucho más fácil que Rabi RIbi ya que en ningún momento morí (ojo, el juego es más sencillo que Rabi Ribi, pero en cierta parte de la historia hay un amento dramático de la dificultad que sin llegar a volver el juego difícil, si es algo que desentona por lo artificial que se sintio), además de que su propia ambición le juega en contra debido a que al intentar contar una historia con un tono mas serio al final se vuelve cringe... yo intente seguir la historia, pero como por la mitad me aburrio por lo tan edgy y no intencionalmente cringe que es y al final solo lo skipe, pero hey, al menos ahora si tenemos personajes hombres, lo malo es que sigue conservando ese estilo artistico de mmo chino generico

Unchecked maximalism leading to a game that's very much less than the sum of its parts. With insane boss design, fantastic combat, pretty fun exploration bits it should've been a slam dunk. But for me it ended up ringing hollow due to game's unwillingness to restrain itself — be it from sending you on yet another McGuffin hunt, introducing unnecessary traversal mechanic, or throwing a new location with subpar gimmicks. Many parts of the game are great, and the marriage of extrinsically and intrinsically motivated gameplay to a point worked so well I was ready to proclaim that GemaYue invented digital crack. But somebody should have stopped him before stepping on rakes.

The other side of the coin is the story that's so earnest, sensational and... bad in ways that's consonant with Tevi as a whole, putting you through the wringer of non-established conflicts, unearned drama and neverpresent characters. It's easy to feel writer's excitement and how invested they are in their world, but with so many story bits flopping once the initial charm of adventure evaporates, you've yet again left to reflect on the virtue of moderation.

To me, Rabi Ribi is a masterpiece, and one of my favorite games of all time. It's hard as nails, has tons of fun secrets, a deep combat system, and freedom of exploration in a genre known for overwhelming players with what they can’t do. It's easy to see just how much it bucked traditional metroidvania trends from just playing it for a few minutes. You start the game with two wall jumps, you unlock most of your combat abilities very fast, and Quick Drop provides quite decent mobility from the beginning. What made Rabi Ribi stand out was that it was indulgent in a way that spoke to GemaYue’s particular design sense. It was confident -- it knew what it was and challenged you to get on its wavelength. As a result, it was often obtuse, with major mechanics being left up entirely to player discovery, a bold philosophy you can only get from a genuinely passionate capital G Gamer who wants to share his vision of fun to the world; one reminiscent of games before the Internet spoiled their every little secret.

Maybe you're expecting me to start bemoaning Tevi’s lack of ‘soulkino’ or whatever right about now, but really, even though it sacrificed the freedom and intentional jank for more curation and tutorializing, this is a great follow-up to Rabi Ribi from a gameplay perspective. There are more helping hands to accommodate new players, like Core Expansion, numerous sources of healing, bosses being more exploitable, and the existence of Golden Dodge, but it's still a challenging, and most importantly, FUN experience due to all of the new toys at your disposal. The combat depth, for one, is technically leagues above Rabi Ribi. The sheer number of Sigils, while cumbersome at times, opens up a plethora of builds to pursue, from pure melee to pure ranged to hybrid to bomb focused to combo focused, etc, and they always give you new things to think about when interacting with the mechanics. Rabi Ribi was also about the flow of dodge boss pattern > unleash big combo > prepare for boss’ retaliation > repeat, and I like that both games encourage you to keep the pressure up even during boss attacks for the sake of that all-important combo rank, but with Tevi, the moment you go in to do your thing while the boss is vulnerable, the world is your oyster. Do an airdash, smack them a few times, spanner ground pound, whirlwind spinny, airdash quintuple flash, big spanner whack, backflip, throw knives that inflict a debuff, unleash a few charge shots, whatever. This is like crack to my Rabi poisoned brain. It is every bit as gratifying as I expected.

So yes, the game was worth the wait for this combat system alone, but the movement is great too. It thankfully retains a lot of the same movement tech from its predecessor (as well as some new ones -- I hope Love Bunny retains the Quick Drop bounce idea), which makes exploring a blast. It helps that the map is freaking huge this time around, and the areas that comprise it are all quite varied and pretty to look at, with another banger soundtrack to boot. Rabi Ribi’s map was more a vehicle to connect the various bosses together, and if you found issue with that, Tevi has environmental hazards and devilish enemy placement in spades. The secrets aren’t messing around either -- it was rarely immediately obvious how to approach them (but they were still more fun to collect in Rabi Ribi due to its ‘jank’ and important gear like airdash accessible early on). Although Tevi's locales are more entertaining overall, sifting through such a massive map for items diminishes my willingness to 100% the game again, but it nonetheless gives players plenty of extrinsic motivation to explore, as not only does uncovering map tiles reward XP, but the potential resources are too useful to pass up especially on the hardest difficulties. I thought I would be annoyed by the crafting system, but it’s actually quite an elegant alternative to Rabi Ribi’s admittedly odd, loose idea of progression. You no longer need to look to enemy grinding for money, and the resources which gate item upgrades and Sigil crafting are supplied at a reasonably steady rate. If you just play through the game normally, it’s likely you will be able to fully upgrade everything well before its conclusion, though it’s not like you even need to outside of a few specific ones, as they’re mostly modular stat boosts. This heavy injection of Game Design™, for better or worse, makes Tevi feel like a more standard metroidvania experience. If you want, you can go out of your way to snag every buff potion available, equip all the powerful Sigils, upgrade your equipment, and craft all the strongest healing items, but if you want a challenge, you need to dip your toes into self-imposed handicaps. Rabi Ribi, on the other hand, never allowed the player to become too powerful due to its level scaling mechanic, which was a necessary evil to ensure the game was reasonably beatable on low item% runs while also allowing bosses to become unspeakable hellspawns when players have everything except excuses to fall back on. Tevi ditched this intense boss scaling and instead decided to tie only Bunny Potions to item%, which is a sensible move. However, because I autistically searched every nook and cranny, the game became a cakewalk around Chapter 5 (yes, on Expert mode), which kind of surprised me, but that's not to say it’s bad design, I mean, I was rewarded for my exploration. I’m just a weirdo who likes my games unreasonably hard, so Rabi Ribi’s approach is more my speed. Speaking of difficulty, Tevi unfortunately commits a similar error to Rabi Ribi by forcing players to finish the game before its hardest difficulty is unlocked, which I will never understand the point of. I guess I would want to die if I were forced to manually skip the million cutscenes before each boss a bunch more times.

Actually, on that note…

Tevi suffers from one major problem that Rabi Ribi doesn’t, and I feel it will ultimately be what strengthens my allegiance to that game as superior. Tevi doesn’t know when to shut up. Characters talk talk talk, going on and on about the lore, with endless exposition and meaningless tangents, and the dialogue is not well written enough to justify it. Neither is the story as a whole, unfortunately, despite the occasionally inspired idea. This makes it all the more frustrating because the game is entirely beholden to its story, resulting in poorer map design decisions. Sure, while a cute & charming vibe, Rabi Ribi’s plot was the furthest thing from a literary masterpiece, but at least it wasn’t an active hindrance, and the little dialogue it did have was straight and to the point. There were almost no gates between you and enjoying the game. To think that Tevi went through all this trouble to design itself around such a disappointingly barebones, subpar story is just sad, frankly. The silver lining to all this is the Free Roam and Speedrun options, which, personally, as someone who’s currently going through the game again on Speedrun mode, make the previous experience feel like a prison. I love Tevi -- when I actually get to play it, that is. Your first time through will be affronted with a plague of text boxes which may as well say “NO FUN ALLOWED” copy and pasted hundreds of times. I just couldn’t bring myself to care. Rabi Ribi has better writing than Tevi, and I will die on that hill.

GemaYue is a genius game designer, and next time, hopefully in a direct sequel to Rabi Ribi, his abilities can shine unrestrained by a story he is being compelled to tell. Until then, at the very least, I am enjoying the post-game modes more than the initial playthrough, and I trust that it will get several good DLCs in the future.

GemaYue please make DLC and have one of them be Tevi Vena yuri it's insane how much potential they have and yet they barely interact; even outright teasing about the potential. In general the world and cast has a lot of potential that's only really scratched the surface and I really hope there's more coming in here because this is really strong groundwork to bounce off of with a charming cast and some of the best metroidvania combat ever designed, taking Rabi Ribi's and building on top of it. Exploration is definetly a bit on the weaker side because of the much more linear path it takes but I find it to be fun regardless with some great level design; just needed a bit of a tune up for flexibility which Free Roam most likely commits to well enough. Art is pretty great and the designs are all distinct and nice, the graphics and enviormental design are all striking; it's hard to point something in Tevi that falters without a pretty clear silver lining that makes said issue less of a problem; and it really makes what's next for GemaYue to inspire much more hope.

Why have they had to release Tevi two days away from a huge Steam sale? I was already feeling somewhat embarassed by what I've spent on games in the last weekend. And then I open Steam and I am greeted by the cutest bunny lady I've ever seen, Tevi.

I thought to myself: don't do it! You have a huge backlog, dude! You just bought, like, a trillion soulslikes! You're playing Evil West! Don't buy it!

And I was like, okay, I won't buy it. But I will play the demo.

The demo of Tevi is really cool. The devs made a little alternate adventure to show a lot of aspects of their game. And you won't get spoiled by anything, as the demo feels like a filler episode to the anime that is the full game.

The demo was so fire that I couldn't not buy Tevi. And so I bought it.

Game is horny AF. You know anime that emphasizes young woman being hot? Like, Shantae? And how they sometimes play it coy, like, being super näive in tone while also obviously feeling the hots for their characters? Tevi isn't like that, this is an openly horny game. It reminded me of Gust outings, like the Atelier series, Mana Khemia, etc.

Even if you find it cringe (and the game dabbles in fetishes I find somewhat weird), there's no denying how much quality is in this game. Tevi has combos for days, bunny girl hits like Dante from Devil May Cry. The game seems to have learned all the big lessons from decades of 2D game design, and incorporates every quality of life feature that you usually wish for in games of this kind.

Game opens up fast, and you'll be deciding your next adventure in no time. Tevi is story-heavy, and the game almost feels like a visual novel at times. It doesn't drag the pacing too much, and Tevi is a charismatic character. This game can establish relationships between NPCs and its main character, in a way that isn't super common.

Of course, I'm like 5 hours in while writing this, and the game can do the classic "get bad in the final stretch" thing that is so usual of the industry. But, even then, I think that Tevi is a special game. I know for sure that its a very good game in its genre. I'll wait a little for saying what I really think right now: this might be one of the best.

The story holds this game back, both in general and with the metroidvania aspects that Rabi Ribi did better. They tried and almost came close to having something good narratively, but came up short as every arc or plot point just felt... incomplete. Which is a shame because Tevi has some pretty interesting and charming characters with some damn good designs.

But the combat and boss battles... they make it all worth it. The adrenaline rush from some of the best fights in action games really gets you feeling some type of way, and amount of skill customization to change up your approach to battles really pushes it over the edge. And the music rocks.

From the creators of Rabi-Ribi comes a game that you can safely play without fear of someone looking over your shoulder and wondering what's wrong with you (probably)!

TEVI plays pretty similarly to Rabi-Ribi, with a bigger emphasis on melee combat. Tevi's got some pretty versatile moves you can weave in and out of, complemented a side of simplified ranged combat. Supplementing all of this are "sigils", an expansion on Rabi-Ribi's badges. When I say "expansion", I mean that there's an absurd amount of these to collect. The sheer quantity of sigils kinda dilutes the sensation of finding another one hidden in the overworld, but each one tweaks the combat mechanics in a tiny way, which adds up in a big way, and can change your entire playstyle. Good combat would mean nothing without great bosses, and TEVI doesn't disappoint there either. I do think the game is on the easier side though. I didn't die once on normal difficulty, so here's my PSA that you can change the difficulty at any point by having Tevi sleep in her bed back at the Oasis.

I wish I had more good to say about TEVI, but this game has a serious structural problem: its nonlinearity is fake. I spent a lot of time backtracking and exploring in TEVI, only to realize there's like, a single powerup I can grab before I hit the brick wall of "go to the objective please". There's almost never anything meaningful to discover off the beaten path because all the bosses are fought on the linear plot path, and you're barred access to the upgrades that would give you access to new areas until you beat those bosses. The game does offer a "free roam" mode when starting a new game, but that hits you with the exact opposite side of the spectrum: exploration and boss fighting with no real direction. Ideally, you'd want to meet in the middle somewhere, something that Rabi-Ribi already excelled at.

The story itself is fine. I hate to shoot it down for not catching my barely-a-zoomer attention span, but the game loves to infodump on and on about its world, society, past, present, races, and whatever. It became exhausting to read very quickly, and I don't even think it earns a lot of its emotional moments either. So many points where a character dips out of the story for several chapters after being introduced (I'm looking at you, Sable's brother). The best parts were where the characters bounced off each other with charming banter, something that is pretty infrequent after the first few chapters of the game.

The focus on linear plot progression rears its head in other places too, like the map. For some ungodly reason, its default mode focuses on current objectives, and not something like individual areas. You have to press a button to freely scroll the map (otherwise you'll just be scrolling through your current objectives), and you can't even add markers for points of interest from this menu. No, you have to be standing in the room you want to mark, open up your quick-inventory, and add the marker there (same for removing markers!). It's just weirdly inconvenient for no discernable reason. Item totals are measured between loading zones and not by each area too. What I mean is that areas not separated by a fadeout have their item totals lumped together, which is extremely inconvenient for anyone who wants to clear out the map. Pretty sure Rabi-Ribi did this right, what's TEVI's excuse?

The opening statement was meant as a joke, but in all honesty, while TEVI has its own strengths, I do vastly prefer Rabi-Ribi overall. There's a minigame called "Rabi Smash" in one of TEVI's towns, and playing it provided a brief reprieve of charming, non-serious bunnygirl mayhem. And that's just where I feel TEVI falters. They really tried for something more serious, but it feels like a mismatch for this type of game. If anything, TEVI inadvertently elevated my opinion of Rabi-Ribi. Maybe that says more about my personal preferences than it does about the games in question. (And before you ask, no, it's not that I'm into bunnygirls. Good guess though!)

Very enjoyable gameplay, solid music and cute character designs bogged down by a half-baked mess of a story. Objectives feel totally inconsequential and completing sections feels lackluster as a result. Dozens of unimportant characters are constantly introduced just to disappear for the rest of the game and serious/tragic scenes feel unearned. I don't play metroidvanias for story so it doesn't hurt the overall enjoyment for me that much but it is hard to ignore with the amount of cutscenes. Definitely prefer Rabi Ribi which knew how to chill out and not stretch beyond its means.

Tevi has fantastic pixel art, cool music, and an unexpectedly expensive cast (all dialogs are voiced), but the story kind of ruined it for me.

Also, this game is too easy on normal difficulty; you can faceroll any boss in the second half of the game (I always play my action games on normal because I'm a bad gamer). You can change the difficulty at almost any moment, so don't repeat my mistake and choose high or very high

After I started, the game apparently got updated to include free roam mode from the start. Most of my complaints are related to the story and its effect on the game so maybe these no longer apply if you just start with that. The story's not good just start there.

I beat the game on expert mode for the first time. It felt easier than Rabi-Ribi, but I'm also older so it may be that. I found the actual fights more interesting too so either way I don't mind it being easier. Mostly an improvement over Rabi-Ribi, but the weaker areas are a big deal. Combat has plenty of options and bosses are fun. You learn so many different moves with different effects experimenting is great. To me, that's the best part of the game so I'm not as bothered by the weakened exploration as others.The massive amount of sigils gives you room for build variety too. The soundtrack is great too. There's a couple songs licensed from Dance With the Dead that are nice but the Streamer Mode only songs are actually really good.

Character designs are nice, but the story problems means the characters themselves aren't too interesting. As a metroidvania game, the story is bad because it limits exploration to just going where the game wants you to and unlike Rabi Ribi you won't have freedom to do things in basically any order if you're good enough. As a narrative, things are just underdeveloped in general. The characters aren't interesting, the world doesn't have a lot of depth. I feel like this story would be more fitting for another genre.

Overall I still love this game a lot and easily recommend it despite its issues. I wanna say I like it more than Rabi-Ribi but it's been a long time since I did a full playthrough so I can't confidently say that before replaying Rabi Ribi next year.

Backloggd really needs to get their search engine in order. You can't find Tevi in it because it lists all ResidenT EVIl games and never finds this one. You have to reach here from an actual search engine... Anyways, copying my review from Steam:

MASSIVE improvement over Rabi Ribi.

Gameplay is basically more of the same, but even more fluid. You no longer need to manage a "hold button" charge along with another to mash for melee attacks, so that allows for melee combos to become more elaborate as you have less of a mental stack to manage the shots. Ranged combat itself is far better for it too, you can either dump tons of damage at once with multiple charged shots or pace them alongside with the combos (although the target always "unstaggers" after a while). Customization is also huge with sigils, to the point where it kinda becomes a con. Building Sigil loadouts is a double-edged sword where you get to customize a build to perfectly enhance the way you play or cover your shortcoming, but managing the Equip Points can be an boring task when you're juggling which 8p you're dropping to make space for 2 4p or vice-versa.

Boss design is also an huge leap. Unpopular opinion I guess, but bosses in Rabi Ribi weren't that good. They were too much bullet hell and not enough metroidvania. For a genre blender, it was massively unbalanced. This time around though? Perfection. Bosses have (most of the times) reactable patters while also not constantly pissing bullets everywhere. The actual bullet hell segments are left for the fight's climax only, which makes for a much better pacing and challenge. You can also turn the hitbox for it to be always on in bosses which makes the fight far more manageable.

The game isn't easier though. It's still borderline frustrating if you just beeline it to the story's boss and never explore. Hard+ and Inferno is still a gauntlet for the aficionados. Even regular enemies can be your downfall up until the very endgame when you're truly and well overpowered.

And this time around, the story actually makes sense! Because the true ending of Rabi Ribi feels like the dog ending in Silent Hill 2, but instead of being an easter egg you unlock as a fun sideshow, it's the climax to the whole game. In here, story makes sense throughout and the whole just just feels like a coherent story. Art style is also a massive improvement. Prettier HUDs, menus, user interface, backgrounds, character sprites, and more. Plus an amazing OST in boss fights.

Really, Tevi is a hit on all sixes. I have some gripes with how the story doesn't actually come full circle and leaves some questions unanswered, there's a couple of stages where the level design REALLY pissed me off (Verdawn Forest fog map can go ♥♥♥♥ itself), some songs get annoying, the design is far too linear and resistant to skips, but none of these issues drag the overall quality down. Tevi is just consistent all around, showing that even if nothing really "new" is done it can still be enjoyable if it's just polished enough. Lessons were learned, improvements were applied. Can't ask for more from a game that was already good really.

Disappointing.
The combat is still good and the bosses are still interesting, but for me the meat of RR and what actually made me play it for like 200 hours is how much it let you break itself in half and be rewarded for it. If you knew how, you could go literally anywhere in the game. Fight Lilith as your first encounter? Sure. Go to the water zone without the water orb and fight the boss in slow-mo? Of course. Climb up a wall and skip 80% of the story and end up in the final chapter of the game? Go wild, buddy.
All of that Tevi lacks because it decided to have a S T O R Y, which makes the game work against itself. You're never really allowed to go off the path the game lays out for you because everywhere is blocked and you're denied any shred of movement tech that can get you to a zone that the game doesn't intend you to be in yet.
It gives you three mcguffins to collect at the start and says "go get em bucko", and then after you get one of them it lets you go to the next chapter.
You know what you get for collecting all three of them before proceeding? Nothing. Zilch, nnada. If you're lucky, you may get a couple of upgrade potions on the way, but you get nothing meaningful that would actually incentivize you go out of your way and actually go there before doing the story. And you know what? You should just go there, because the only way you get anything Actually New in this game is by proceeding with the story. It gives you a jump boost you will literally never acquire otherwise.
After how much Rabi-Ribi let me go wild, I was waiting for this game for so long to scratch that itch again, but lol.
Not a bad game, just an extremely disappointing one for someone who expected an actual spiritual Rabi-Ribi followup.

Allegedly has a free-roam mode, but requires you to beat the game twice to access it so I'm never doing it.
I guess I'll just be waiting for Gemayue's next game; at least he won't have to contort the world to the story written by someone else.

It should be illegal to make a game with combat this good.

While this game is sick as fuck, it does make me appreciate just how special Rabi Ribi’s exploration and progression actually is. Tevi does have fun exploration and a little bit of nonlinearity but for much less of the game than what Rabi Ribi allowed. Everything else Tevi offers makes up for it though. Great music, diverse environments, fun movement, hilariously absurd customization, and one of the best boss casts this industry has ever seen. I will say that the story was really testing my patience, especially when it hit me with a plot twist that I genuinely cannot believe was written in the Year of our Lord 2023, but the characters are kinda charming so I could tolerate it.

Damn that was a game, time to explain why Tevi is my new favorite game of all time.

Just a warning I may ramble a little here.

Going over the most obvious thing first the bosses are phenomenal, I would say this was no surprise given how much I loved Rabi Ribi's bosses, but these broke ANY expectations I had going in. From start to end the bosses are constantly one-upping themselves, getting better and better culminating in some of the craziest final few bosses I have ever seen. Every boss is extremely distinct, all their movesets are completely original and at times will even take some VERY OBVIOUS inspiration from things such as Touhou and Devil May Cry. I love this, seeing Tevi pay homage to the games that very clearly inspired it is awesome, I adore seeing Tevi's own rendition of some iconic characters and attacks. These bosses are an absolute joy to fight, and this is one of those games where I will gladly bang my head against these bosses for hours on end not even realizing how much time has passed.

Alongside bosses being great Tevi also has ridiculously good balancing and gives a ton of customization through way of build variety and the multiple ways to customize how difficult the game actually is, even outside of the sheer number of difficulty options. The "ridiculously good balancing" part may seem controversial as it's very clear that some things are outright broken or have insane synergies but let me explain. A wise man once said, "You have control over the buttons you press" and that rings true here. Tevi's genius balancing stems from the sheer number of options you have that will vastly change how you play and how difficult the game is. Your base kit is balanced perfectly, everything you have feels about equal in strength with nothing feeling overtuned in the slightest. However, you can change this with optional equipment called "sigils" to make certain things stronger than others, and there are well over 200 of these equipables. You can obviously use a broken build with the sheer number of options you have, and spam consumable items while doing so, taking down endgame bosses with ease. But at the same time, you have the option to forgo those powerful options, making the game more difficult and drastically changing how you play at any point as you please. You can steamroll bosses, you can fight on an even playing field, or you could forgo all those customization options and fight with the odds completely stacked against you, I adore this type of game balancing. Very often I would fight a boss with a broken build, only to reset the fight near the end and switch to a build that would make the fight more difficult for fun. I always see people complaining about games with an obscene number of options having "balancing issues" because there's some obviously broken or weak options, even with Tevi, I've seen people complain about how bosses get easier as the game progresses, due to how powerful you can get. But I feel as if this is a misconception as to what good balancing actually is, outside of competitive games, good balancing isn't having all your options be at equal strength, good balancing is giving the player a wide variety of options to choose from with those options fluctuating in strength. Tevi masters this by having everything in your base kit be around equal strength, while having everything optional being at completely fluctuating strengths that you can change at any point. Using something less powerful will not detract from the actual gameplay and force you to avoid certain skills or mechanics, it will only affect how easy the game is, and that's why I believe Tevi's balancing is genius.

Exploration is also an absolute joy. I was a bit taken off guard at first due to how different this game's approach to exploration was compared to Rabi Ribi's. While Rabi Ribi is completely freeform with what you decide to do at any given point, Tevi takes a more linear route with bosses past chapter 1 being ordered and movement options essentially being unlocked with story progression. I may still prefer how Rabi Ribi handles its freeform progression, allowing you to get even endgame gear immediately, but that isn't to say I think Tevi is too far off with its linear progression. Tevi's linearity allows for the areas to be more catered to your current gear at any point, placing more emphasis on things that you may have just unlocked, leading to Tevi having far better areas in my opinion. Tevi's individual areas are a joy to explore and there were very few points where I wasn't having a complete blast exploring them, fuck mazes tho. Re-exploring areas to find hidden items and whatnot is also extremely fun with the only complaint I actually have being the odd number of places that look they should have items or resources.

Getting some last thoughts out of the way, aesthetically Tevi is fantastic. The soundtrack is incredible and goes way harder than it has ANY right to go and visually I adore how this game looks. Boss fights look incredible ESPECIALLY in comparison to Rabi Ribi. They have some of the coolest bullet patterns and attacks I have ever seen in a game period. I also love the artstyle of this game from the fantastic pixel art to the equally as good portraits to some of the best CGs I have ever seen, the quality here is unreal and they clearly were trying to go above and beyond in this regard. I also had fun with the story, while it's nothing too crazy and the main plot is pretty basic the characters are extremely fun, and dialogue is fantastic the whole way through. I especially love the main trio & the father/daughter dynamic between Tevi & her dad, it's really cute. I have also seen people already complaining about how "horny" or "anime" this game is and to that I say to refer to my Rabi Ribi review and read through the comments bc they're pretty funny (https://www.backloggd.com/u/AiriBan/review/953999/), for a tldr y'all complaining are pussies and only have yourselves to blame, fuck you.

I prolly missed something while writing this review but oh wellsies

TLDR this game is crazy fucking good and broke any expectations I had before it released. I love Tevi.

Solid spiritual sequel to Rabi-Ribi. Interesting gameplay mechanic additions and the exploration aspect is more fleshed out. Difficulty seems a bit lower. Boss fights are excellent but unlike Rabi-Ribi this doesn't feel like a bossrush game, for better or worse. It's more of a balanced metroidvania game. Movement mechanics are more gated behind progress and basically all mechanics are tutorialized instead of being left to player discovery.

TEVI still suffers from having to unlock higher difficulty modes over multiple playthroughs and repeat the same metroidvania collectathon between them. Personally annoying since I mainly want to see the boss fights on Infernal, not hunt through hundreds of rooms for items again.
I prefer the more linear stage design introduced in the Rabi-Ribi DLC (TEVI has linear & boss rush sections near the endgame, these feel similar) and would be more keen to replay such a game across different modes.
In TEVI even though the exploration & secret hunting are improved: if they're not the games strongest point is it really worth expanding to be a bigger part of the game? (eg. exploration taking up more hours between every combat & boss section). Same goes for the story being more of a focus, but I don't really mind.

For presentation I found the music to be great much like Rabi-Ribi. In-combat visuals are nice and it's generally clear to see what's going on, combining well with the snappy controls. That is apart from a screen shake effect introduced during a couple specific boss attacks that just makes it hard to see what's happening.