Reveil – Review

Release a few months ago, we finally got our hands on Reveil last week, and after waiting for darkness to fall, the lights went out and we jumped in head first to the weird twisted world of Reveil brought to us by Pixelsplit and Daedelic Entertainment.

You step into the shoes of a Circus stage builder, who awakes disoreantated with a bad headache, you soon find your wife Martha and daughter Dorie are missing, so you set off to explore, looking for them, you’re quickly introduced to a few simple puzzles, such as finding a figurine to unlock a jewellery box, which contains the key needed to exit your bedroom.
The search continues and after more exploration and gradually more difficult (and intriguing) puzzles to solve, things start to get a little more weird as you’re transported through reality into a slightly different setting, which starts to leave you questioning your sanity and memories.

You’ll soon be exploring your old Circus setting, still in search of your wife and daughter, and once again there’s more puzzles to solve as well as a few mini-games which range from being an integral part of progression to simlpy giving you an extra achievement or two.

By this point, with the nods towards mental helath, poor memory and your wife and daughter still missing, it’s all following a pretty predictable path, the good news is, as linear and predicatable as it might be (and my very early guesses were soon proven right), the game doesn’t end there, after a number of stealth/evasion based tasks, it takes another pretty strong twist, which I definitely didn’t see coming, and while the second half of game reamins pretty linear, with a few less puzzles to solve, it does keep you guessing right up to the final door.

The full play-through will take most people about 3-4 hours, which is long enough to keep you interested, but not so long that it starts to feel dormant. You will however find a number of endings to unlock, while a few are as simple as making a slightly different decision right at the end you will need to use your head a little to figure out all of them, thankfully they won’t require a full play-through and you can use the main menu to jump back to any chapter to prevent retreading too much old ground.

While Reveil pushes itself as a horror game, there’s no jump-scares and any frights are usually well predicted making this more of a psychological theme, there’s plenty of sensitive subjects at hand from drug abuse, violence, mental illness and obviously your missing wife and daughter and while it’s all a little too surreal to feel realistic, the twists at the end do help throw everything into perspective.

Graphically Reveil does a pretty good job of looking great and providing plenty of detail, whether it’s the detail of your home, circus or the surroundings you eventually find yourself in, wether there’s surreal mind-twisting transitions between areas, or just the books on a bookshelf, everything is presented well with plenty of variation between areas and some fantastic lighting effects which combines for an impressiv epresentation especially for a low cost title.
Audio does a fairly good job of delivering the world around you, but I didn’t feel the overall soundtrack really helped raise the tension or fear, at times it felt more like a walking simulator than the mind-bending reality it was supposed to be.

Overall, Reveil was an enjoyable adventure, which kept me playing long past my bedtime, and pulled me back the following day to explore more endings, It could have been a little longer, more taxing, scarier and that first half, a lot less predictable, but considering the low price of under £14, it’s easy to recommend for those wanting a short adventure / walking simulator which will keep your mind engaged and your head entertianed.

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