ReSetna review: Robosoulsvania

ReSetna is a Metroidvania for a particular kind of person. The kind that loves combat that puts you in memorable situations, where every room is eventually burned into your synapses and progression comes fast and furious. Even if it's bouncing around an ever-expanding network of combat tunnels until you find a way forward is exactly what genre sickos are into, there are a few things that hold it back.

Booting up

From the start, ReSetna makes a great impression. It has a great, memorable art direction that makes the robot post-apocalypse seem as miserable as it sounds. Controls are snappy and enemy design is varied and interesting in almost any combination they’re thrown at you. You play as ReSetna, a combat robot who is on a quest through the ruins of a once great world, fighting her kind that has slowly fallen to madness while accumulating more tools to progress in tucked-away treasures and by exchanging the parts of her fallen peers. It's Robot Dark Souls! Even down to the NPCs talking in lore-heavy implications and a poison swamp.

Combat is fast and hits hard. Even a few enemies can ruin your run to the next point of interest if you aren’t careful. To make things easier you’ll eventually get a dodge, a parry, and a slowly expanding arsenal of weapons, abilities, and equipable passive abilities. Many of these skills are genre staples like a double jump, air dash, shield and so on which help you while platforming and sometimes in combat. On paper, all of this works. In practice not so much. There were a few times a dodge had me stuck in the geometry of the level, setting me up for slaughter or my attack button just wouldn’t work after coming out of a shield.

Some not-so-adorable jank

It doesn’t happen all the time, but often enough to cause accidental deaths and minute-long runbacks to catch up on progression. This also extends to the platforming which, just like the combat, feels either fantastic or frustrating. As an example, I was hard stuck for 30 minutes because I had to perform a double jump from a ladder, into a dash to grab a ledge. At that point, I didn’t even know you could do that because it was the only time that kind of jump came up. When I tried it for the first 3-4 times detaching myself from the ladder would eat one of my jumps and my dash would send me face-first into lasers. I searched everywhere after that, thinking I had missed an ability or hidden path but no, I just needed to fiddle a little further until I finally nailed the execution of that jump.

Boss fights find themselves in a similar situation. They are well-designed fights, with fun and varied moves that keep you on your toes. But you barely do any damage to them, even with the stronger weapons you are slowly biting away at their rusty steel ankles until they finally give up. I have no problem with tanky enemies or long fights, but they hit hard, and their hitboxes seem a little unfair. Getting stuck on the first one, because the damage I was doing was abysmal (I got a little better after) had me searching every corner of the map thinking I had missed something.

I will love you at a later time

All of this is very upsetting because when ReSetna works, it's an incredibly tight, action-focused Metroidvania with many cool combat gauntlets to overcome. Even the platforming has some cool sections that were fun to nail. It's just some of the wonkier aspects of the game, things I hope the team at Today’s Games can fix in a timely fashion. As a final parting gift, the game crashed, corrupted my save file and I had to start from 0.

I hope this doesn’t read too negatively, but the build I played had all the makings of a great game but was held back by small technical issues here and there that just kept piling up. If you’re intro Metroidvanias with tight combat, there is a lot to love here but unless you can forgive some jank, I recommend at least waiting for a couple more patches before you dive into this one.

A PC copy was provided by the publisher for this review. ReSetna is out now on PC. A PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch version are planned to release later this year.

Timo Reinecke

Contributing Editor

Timo is an avid enjoyer of all things video games hailing from Germany. After being abandoned as a child on the Rolanberry Fields of Final Fantasy XI, they have developed an undying love for the digital worlds of MMOs. But if you can't find them crafting up a storm in Final Fantasy XIV, you'll probably find them workshopping combos in action/fighting games or being extremely passionate about the latest mobile title.

Outside of gaming, Timo is usually skimming through the Criterion Collection or praying to whatever Eldritch horror that their latest favorite manga doesn't get damaged in shipping. You can find live reactions to all of that on Blusky @alahftel.blusky.org.