 Reverie. It's the latest game from New Zealand based indie developer Rainbite and is what I would call a Zelda-like game. It's heavily influenced by adventure games of the past and features an overworld to explore with dungeons and collectibles to find. The game starts off by telling the legend of Hekei, the founder of Toromi Island. So Hekei and his three brothers went fishing and this result in Hekei's line catching onto the island and pulling it up. It's gotta be about a quadrillion tons, very strong guy. Anyway, his brothers got salty about this and drowned him leading to all four of their spirits haunting the island for all of eternity. It's quite a story already. And soon we are introduced to the protagonist, Tai, who is on a boat to the very same island to spend some time with his grandparents. Get a load of this guy. So we're introduced to Grandpa, it tells you to explore the town a bit. You can explore the beach, talk to locals, and you have a rolling move to get around faster. Your map starts off blank and it gradually fills up as you explore the island, which is nice. Exploring the town, we find various people and locations, including a store and an arcade. But this early in the game, you're dead broke, so you can't play any arcade games yet. So heading to grandpa's house, we find out that the path to the volcano has been blocked off. I'm sorry, but why would anyone want to even go to the volcano? I mean, it's a volcano. So moving on, you get a cricket bat as a gift from your grandparents, which can be swung around. So this is already the most New Zealand game I've ever played. After getting the lantern for grandpa, he proceeds to ask Tai to go to the basement to get a book. So entering the basement, we can see that it's clearly an old-school dungeon like Zelda. And boy, does he have a rodent problem. The basement is infested with ferrets, rats, bees, and giant mutant hedgehogs, and it feels like the basement is enormous compared to the rest of the house. So in these dungeons, you have to clear enemies by hitting them with the bat. You collect keys and you open doors, and if you get injured, you can heal yourself by eating some pizza that happens to be lying around and dropped by rats and bees. And there are plenty of puzzles scattered across the dungeon. After getting the boss key, we can finally enter the boss door, which holds a evil washing machine. It's simple enough, dodge the clothes and don't get crushed. After being the boss, we find out that it is actually a spirit, and it tells you to seek out Heke and his brother's spirits and defeat them because they were causing havoc around the island. So returning the book to Grandpa, he tells us a story of a flying kiwi. He doesn't acknowledge that his basement is full of wild animals and demons. He just stands there. So he then tells you to get lost, and this is literally the last time you ever need to talk to him. He just has no significance for a story after this point, which is a bit unfortunate. So he says the same thing over and over again when you come back and he doesn't even tell you to do anything after that. So like Grandpa said, we go out to talk to people and start exploring the island with no adult supervision, which is inhabited by lots of interesting characters and of course tons of animals that you can kill. Eventually you get a yo-yo from a reclusive conspiracy theorist. Man, this game has caulking koalas too. Now, the yo-yo can be used to stun enemies. We eventually find our second dungeon that has slimes that can only be beaten by being stunned with the yo-yo first and then attacked, making the yo-yo a necessity for this type of combat. This dungeon requires you to find leaves to build a plant that you can climb and it introduces a new weapon, dart gun. The dart gun shoots projectiles and is going to be used for a lot of puzzles and long-range combat, but you have to restock on ammo by attacking enemies and crates and finding more darts. Eventually we head back to the arcade with the money that we collected from all the rodents we killed. Brian here tells us that if we beat his high score he'll give us feather. Wow, what a great prize of feather. Well, in this game feathers are the main collectible and you basically have to look around and complete odd tasks for our NPCs to collect them all. The arcade game Star Blazer has its own scoreboard and it's a space shooter similar to Galaga. It actually gets very dig-ding and it was even a trophy for getting a high score. So after clearing dungeons you're pretty much told where to go based on X on your map, which I personally feel might be a bit hand-holdy. I would have preferred if characters in the game gave you subtle hints of where to go next through their own dialogue rather than leave a big X on your map with no further explanation of why you're going somewhere. There's literally no reason why you're going anywhere. The closest thing you get is a little girl asking you to meet her at the beach, which is where you help her build a sand castle. And it turns out the sand castle you build with her is the next dungeon, which I thought was interesting. So up until now the formula is to find new dungeons, unlock new weapons and abilities in these dungeons, and use them to navigate puzzles on your way to the final boss. And believe me when I say that these puzzles are very challenging at times, requiring you to use various tools and really think outside the box with them. It's very refreshing to see games taking puzzles seriously, where most games these days are quite easy with their puzzles requiring just a few seconds of thinking, while this game can have you stuck for half an hour on each puzzle before getting it. You eventually get to a new island where some people ask a child to perform an exorcism on their home and you find ghosts that look like they should be hosting a killing game, which leads you to the next dungeon, which is full of ghosts and puzzles involving a rotating floor. There are a lot of secrets in the overworld. You meet a talking microwave, which wants to play air hockey with you, and talking kiwis, and even a fisherman who doesn't have much luck caching fish. There's even a farm where the residents ask a child to exterminate rats for them. These are some responsible people here. The final dungeon is an incredibly complex maze of multiple floors, very challenging puzzles, and difficult enemies. I spent well over an hour getting through the entire dungeon, and it was one of the best mine exercises I've seen recently, with complex puzzles that require multiple tools and a lot of thinking outside of the box. After beating this dungeon, you've beaten the game and have seen the credits at this point. It may feel a bit short, but there's still some post-game content, including finding all the rest of the feathers, helping the fisherman out, talking to the kiwis, and exploring the bonus dungeon that opens up after the credits. The bonus dungeon is basically a challenge mode type of level. No puzzles, just enemies attacking from every corner, and it's very difficult. In conclusion, I think this is a nice game, very reminiscent of old action adventure games, with interesting characters and fun gameplay. It took me about 7 hours to 100% the game, so it isn't incredibly long either. It's well worth the price, and I'd recommend it.