Indie Game of the Week 415: Redo!

Throw those crosses and save those animals because it's exploration platformer time once again here on the IG of the W for April 11th. On this occasion, the map-scouring marvel we have to peruse is Robson Paiva's Redo!: a post-apocalyptic variant where a survivor fights past waves of misshapen mutants across a dilapidated city to find what might possibly be the only other living human being after she is left a mysterious message. Using a combination of melee and ranged weapons, plus an always-handy evade roll that I literally discovered only as I was heading towards the end of the game, the protag can choose to confront or elude the various terrors stalking the surface and underground of a once-bustling urban center.

Redo! is the unusual case of an exploration platformer/survival horror hybrid, a.k.a. an explorror game. That's not to say the explormer genre wasn't already steeped in horror—Castlevania is firmly entrenched in the clichés of classic spook fiction while Metroid's always had a tense atmosphere, more so recently with the unstoppable nemeses of the SA-X and the corrupted E.M.M.I. units—but those were largely more of an aesthetic, thematic aspect rather than adapting the mechanics of survival horror into an explormer framework. For instance, in Redo! you only ever have a limited stock of ammo for your ranged weapons: they all pull from a universal pool, with the stronger weapons needing more ammo per shot, so you'll regularly need to consider your reserves whenever you're assessing the current route and its obstacles. Your starting health of 100 seems generous until you realize most enemies will knock off 25-30 per hit, since this is the type of game where you want to move along cautiously and with the best tools in mind. Since you lose any progress made since your last checkpoint if you die—and they're not particularly common sights—it's often a pretty tense ordeal to get back in one piece and save whatever item progress you've made. As with a few other explormers made in a Soulsy model, enemies stay gone until you hit the checkpoint and they all respawn which not only incentivizes saving less frequently (bad idea, but the game's an expert in lulling you into a false sense of security) but making frequent trips back the way you came since you've already cleared a path.

A notable characteristic of the game's menagerie of barely-sentient body horrors is that they're all partially bio-mechanical and run off an energy reserve that drains whenever they fire their weapons or get damaged (the smaller blue number next to their gray health). Once this reserve is depleted the enemy goes into a "stun" mode for a few seconds before it recharges, during which they're often vulnerable to attack as they'll take double damage and are usually in a state of temporary paralysis. This isn't necessarily the case with all of them, however, and some are actually more dangerous once they're in this mode. Even so, the extra damage and the fact they'll only drop health pick-ups while in this state is encouragement enough to deal the final blow in that brief window while they're seeing stars. All the enemy types have slightly different attack patterns, ranges, and stun mode behaviors to observe before you should get too close: as with any survival horror, you're unlikely to live long if you charge into every fray.

The protagonist wields an axe up close but standing inches away from these things is rarely the best place to be unless they're currently incapacitated. Instead, the player can find up to nine different sub-weapons (and can equip three—you can switch mid-battle too, though it's worth noting the game never pauses while you're doing this) that offer either a much greater reach or greater damage or, usually, both. Since ammo is scarce, however, it's best to save the boomsticks for the tougher enemies or else use as few shots as possible to bring an enemy into a vulnerable state to finish it off. Enemies drop ammo occasionally as well as health, though you obviously can't depend on seeing too much of either. Still, going up against most of this game's enemy types without a ranged weapon can be suicide, so you're once again weighing your options throughout.

Another unusual choice for a game of this sort is the complete lack of a map. I was waiting for a Silent Hill style tourist pamphlet that I could pick up and start crossing out the doors on but it never materialized. It's not a particularly large world to explore, at least, though it does help to have a good memory for where you've yet to go and where you'll need to revisit later. The main progress-blocker, a series of odd statues, can't be dealt with until you have a sufficiently strong firearm to destroy them and there's also hazards like invisible enemies that you need to figure out how to overcome (or if you're the speedrunning type you could probably dodge right past them, sight unseen). The map's also full of shortcuts, mostly of the droppable ladder variety, so you'll end up seeing the more central areas pretty frequently and can plan your next destination from there. I can't say I believe the game's grasp of tense atmosphere is dramatically improved by blinding the player in this fashion—if anything, it just makes it more frustrating for the directionally-challenged as they run around in circles—but I've seen this happen with a few developers of smaller explormers who probably figured they could save themselves the hassle of implementing a map function into the UI if their world's not so big to necessitate it.

I'll admit that Redo! offers a pretty intriguing divergence from typical exploration platformers—even those that truck with the grotesque and the macabre, such as the Salt or Blasphemous series—in the way it incorporates those survival horror mechanics and keeps things suspenseful with your limited resources. Like most explormers, the difficulty curve relaxes considerably once you've found enough upgrades to mitigate most of the challenge of the end-game—after all, the developers can't assume all their entire player base is patient enough to find every power-up, and the game still needs to be beatable for them too—and the scarcity aspect is one of the first to disappear as you find tools to increase the amount of ammo and health that get dropped, but the game still tosses some tough encounters your way throughout and you'll often walk away from a fight with either no ammo or low health (or both) and feel the sudden need to beat a hasty retreat. It's definitely not a game to take lightly, and that plus its novelty factor is enough to raise it above the common explor-rabble even with a rough localization and some same-y environments that don't make them any easier to navigate without that darn map (plus dedicating a single achievement to an entire NG+ playthrough is just terrible achievemetiquette). Wasn't sure what to expect given Redo!'s been out six years and I'd never heard of it before but it's another case of how this genre has gems hidden all over the place out there to discover. Kinda fitting, I suppose, given what they're usually all about.

Rating: 4 out of 5.