Tevi won me over on its genre mashup and its execution of bullet hell combat. While it’s a rare gem of an accessible bullet hell title, its metroidvania exploration ends up being rewarding for those who opt into sticking to the end when additional modes of traversal are made available to the player.
Last year, I was given an opportunity to preview Tevi for the PC. At the time, it was in Early Access, meaning that much of the game was unfinished and the main goal was for me to test out its metroidvania meets bullet hell combat in a handful of boss encounters. At the time, I was solidly impressed with what I was given access to play. Tevi released last November on PC. I didn’t get to review the full game on PC…but now that it’s out on PS5, I jumped at the chance to throw my hat in the ring and see how the game evolved.
If you haven’t read through my initial thoughts on Tevi, I would encourage you to start there just so you can get grasp on my optimistic first impressions. I won’t go so far as to say that my opinion has drastically changed since last year’s preview, but I will admit that my optimism has tempered.
The metroidvania gaming space hasn’t reached the point of oversaturation like the roguelite space recently has, but it’s hard to recommend metroidvanias to players when classics like Hollow Knight and Blasphemous exist and give players a run for their money. When developers take the metroidvania gameplay loop and merge it with another subgenre, like roguelike or soulslike, this is where things get interesting.
Tevi stands apart from other metroidvanias in that incorporates bullet hell combat with 2D action platforming. There are very few games that occupy this niche barring a few exceptions, those being Rabi-Ribi (Tevi’s predecessor) and Outland. The concept of platforming while bullet patterns fill the screen may sound daunting in theory, but Tevi’s execution makes for something quite unique that challenged me in more ways than one.
Thanks to my prior experience with Tevi, I was able to breeze through the first two chapters with ease. I learned that Tevi is a human orphan who was adopted by a beastkin scientist with a love for all things bunnies. As such, he crafted Tevi a pair of realistic bunny ears so she could blend in with other beastkin. The story takes off quickly when Tevi is captured by the Golden Hand and imprisoned. Upon her escape, she encounters an angel and lost demon (Celia and Sable, respectively) who agree to accompany Tevi in her quest to find Astral Gears.
Tevi is deceptively linear in how it presents quests and exploration. Oftentimes, metroidvanias will encourage restrained exploration in the form of navigating a world of branching paths until you cannot progress further, only to backtrack and take another path that will eventually grant you a powerup that allows you to proceed. In each of its eight chapters, main quests and side quests pepper a gigantic map that encouraged me to explore and backtrack so that I could uncover additional powerups and secrets I had previously missed.
For instance, early on I was to go from the city of Morose into the mines to investigate a disturbance. I got sidetracked with a sidequest in an entirely new direction that eventually led me to an alternative path into the mines. Along the way, I had come across multiple potions and money blocks (my only source of income) that gave me additional power and access to sigils I could use to vary up my attacks.
Tevi’s biome design is very well done thanks to the sheer number of secrets contained within its branching paths. It was quite rare for me to fully explore a biome on my first go-round, and it was even rarer for me to visit a biome exactly once during my playthrough. I love it when metroidvanias are designed around repeat visits so that I can get an opportunity to use every traversal upgrade to its fullest extent.
Speaking of traversal, Tevi is very light on challenging players with platforming and variable traversal for most of the game. It wasn’t until the second half of the game where I gained access to things like the double jump, air dash, and jetpack (!) that allowed me to reach heights that were otherwise blocked off. As a result, this made the first half of the story slower than I would have preferred. If the most my character can do for the first few hours is jump once without being able to dash, that makes for a very slow early game.
This is the first (of very few) aspects where Tevi falls short. I understand that this is meant to be a bullet hell metroidvania first and foremost, but locking so many movement boosters to the second half of the game artificially slows down the combat and exploration. I can admit that the combat is great (and I’ll discuss more of that in a moment), but seeing as the player is expected to explore a gigantic world full of biomes, I want momentum to build up in incremental fashions.
I fear that some metroidvania players expecting to move may put this game down to soon or may be discouraged by its relatively simple platforming. Tevi doesn’t proclaim itself to feature tight platforming, but one or two of its biomes end up having a smidgen of a challenge. Given that the premise of the game was to invoke bullet hell, I wanted to experience hell in multiple forms. I didn’t get that degree of challenge, unfortunately.
Tevi’s combat surprised me, on the other hand. I mentioned in my original preview that the sigil system greatly augmented Tevi’s melee and ranged attacks into fluid combos. In the full release, I was astounded with how many sigils I was able to not only unlock, but equip. Think of sigils like Hollow Knight’s badge system, where equipping a sigil can grant me simple passive power (like bonus health or regeneration) or an active power that changes a melee combo into something else altogether.
As I proceeded further into the game, it got to a point where I could equip an absurd number of sigils at once. On top of that, I had found and purchased a large number of sigils, meaning that I could make changes to my loadout in meaningful fashions without feeling overpowered. The sigil system granted me agency in ways that few games could without making me feel like I could simply cleave through enemies in a single attack. When I mixed and matched sigils and came across unique combinations, I felt powerful and had access to new chains of attacks.
I was reminded of Final Fantasy XVI’s Eikon system when playing Tevi, albeit with less god-bestowed powers and more tools in my toolkit. Oddly enough, during a later chapter I came across a sigil that made it so that I could continuously execute attack combinations without needing to use directional inputs or timing, just like the FFXVI’s Ring of Timely Strikes! When I equipped it, Tevi began to unleash hell on her enemies, deftly changing up my melee and ranged attacks in ways I had seemingly overlooked. It was at that point where I realized where I was clearly playing Tevi incorrectly.
Coming out of Tevi, there was a missed opportunity to grant players that sigil early on. Despite coming across sigils that could modify my attack combinations, I was left to my own devices in learning how to utilize these new sigil-adjusted combos. Tevi was incredibly light in showing me the ropes of its combat to its benefit and detriment. New players, as well as those who clearly don’t read (like me), need a space for us to test out attacks.
The boss battles are where Tevi’s combat and bullet hell aesthetic truly shined. Platormer bosses often utilize the same set of attack patterns with varying degrees of predictability. In a bullet hell, bosses fill the screen with dangerous elements spanning singular bullets, streams of light, and other unique patterns. Tevi synthesized these elements exceptionally well, making it so that I couldn’t just wallop a boss endlessly using attacks. Instead, I had timed windows where I could attack, then I had to dodge patterns of bullets that flew across my screen. At certain points, the boss would change things up to the point of adding new platforms and attacks that continuously kept me on my toes. When I was finally able to defeat a boss after surviving wave after wave of its bullets, I got this rush of excitement and relief.
Bullet hell games aren’t for everyone, but Tevi makes it so that the bullet hell subgenre is accessible. Games like Touhou look insane at first glance, but they end up being punishing affairs where the player is expected to make pixel-perfect adjustments to stay alive. I can’t tell you the number of times I attempted to get into Touhou and some of its spinoffs only to get discouraged by the steepness of its difficulty curves. Tevi pushes all of that aside by giving players a choice in how hard they want the game to be, be it incredibly easy or truly hellish. The “normal” default difficulty (which could be changed at any time) ended up being too easy for me, so I upped it two steps to the Hard difficulty which made the game twice as fun and four times as difficult.
Before I wrap this review, I want to comment on the game’s story, writing, and overall chibi aesthetic. Underneath the 2D chibi aesthetic lies a wealth of fanservice with lewd undertones. I personally didn’t have a problem with the dialogue, but there were several moments where Tevi’s characters surprised me with double entendre and jokes that are best reserved for those 18+. Aside from that, hearing the likes of Yoko Hikasa and Tomokazu Sugita (among many other familiar voice actors/acresses) voice the characters added a nice touch.
Tevi won me over on its genre mashup and its execution of bullet hell combat. While it’s a rare gem of an accessible bullet hell title, its metroidvania exploration ends up being rewarding for those who opt into sticking to the end when additional modes of traversal are made available to the player.
