Stones Of The Revenant Review ( Switch )

Review code used many thanks to Chicken Cat Games

Stones of the Revenant is an action platform game inspired by retro arcade beat-em-up’s from days gone by and developed and released by Chicken Cat Games.

After centuries of peace the Revenant has returned; the nasty Revenant has been resurrected by some heinous and powerful Rune Stones. The Revenant is now hiding out with his undead buddies and preparing a large undead army.

Cast of Characters

After the short story introduction you get to pick one of five hero’s to take on the challenge, defeat the Revenant, and destroy the rune stones.

Each hero has different strengths and different levels of health and mana.

We have: Radcliffe the Knight, with his trusty sword, Halvar the Barbarian and his axe, Brielle the Sorceress with their magic , Galina the Ranger with their bow and arrows, Isaak the Thief with their knife and Fritz the Tinkerer with their spanner. Each hero also has a secondary attack, such as Isaak who flings lots of knives at the enemies.

Side Scrolling Platform

Once you select your hero of choice your journey begins. Stones of the Revenant is a side scrolling rogue action platform game and you must kill all the enemies on screen before your free to move to the next screen. If your in any doubt about when to move to the next screen Stones of the Revenant has you covered as a large arrow with the word “Go” above it appears on the screen to tell you to proceed forward.

If you run out of health which is the four little hearts on the top left of the screen, then it’s game over and you are sent back to the start with one retry available, if you want to try the run again. When you do finish a run, and have vanquished all the enemies you have encountered and the end boss and finally destroyed a rune stone, you’re given a score and a total stage score. Which means you can try to beat your score using a different hero, this gives some replay to the game.

Confession Time

Now..(clears throat) here comes what I would imagine would be a difficult thing for gamer to admit, and certainly for me who has been playing games for probably longer than some of the age’s of our readers, so it might even be harder to admit…. drum roll please… Da Dum… Stones of the Revenant beat me in to a gibbering wreck as I had a lot of trouble playing this game, and not because it’s a badly designed game, nope nothing to do with that. The trouble I had was I’m absolutely utter rubbish at playing this game. Okay, the gibbering wreck part may be a slight exaggeration, but as hard as it is to admit this game did beat me.

I could tell you wonderful things I have seen while playing this game, but I’d be lying, as each time I played the game I died within the first 5 to 10 minutes of starting to play. Obviously my timing was off for jumping the platforms, but it wasn’t so much the platforming that killed me as it was the enemies and the jump, attack, jump sequences I had to do to avoid getting hit between attacking an enemy and avoiding their attack.

There is a line in the blurb of the games official page on the Nintendo eShop site and I quote “Don’t let looks fool you! This is a challenging quest to save the realm of the living… Are you up for it?” Ah ha never has a truer word been spoken than that particular line as I can now hold my hand up and say: “Nope, no and no way is this gamer up to the challenge…” Unless the challenge is to see the first 5 to 10 minutes of the start of Stones of the Revenant over and over and over again, then yes, I’m your woman for that job.

In saying all of the above, that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to play the game, I’ve tried out each character and sadly the end result is much the same each time. According to my profile on my Nintendo Switch, I have given the game some 5 plus hours of play time so it’s not for want of trying. Chicken Cat Games are the proud, proud owners of the new and shiny trophy 🏆 awarded with the honour of first game to have beaten this gamer…..as I hang my head in shame and present you with the screen shot I saw the most off below:

Visuals and Controls

Visually, Stones of the Revenant is vibrant and colourful with its little retro sprites and backgrounds. Music is also in the retro vein and is an 8bit affair, which is fine and suits the overall retro feel of the game.

The game controls smoothly using the joycons and ran well without any glitches… other than player inflicted glitches that is. 🙄

Conclusion

First of apologies to Chicken Cat Games as this review isn’t quite the review of their game they were probably expecting. After many tries to further my progress in the game I resorted to watching a YouTube video of some gameplay, but again I was thwarted in my attempt to see what was ahead of me in the game as the video didn’t show any farther gameplay than I had gotten.

I do like a challenge in a game, however the challenge in Stones of the Revenant was obviously to much for this old girl, if you feel up to taking on the challenge of Stones of the Revenant all I can say is: good luck to you.

Final Verdict: I like it… I just wasn’t up to the challenge. 😞