Reventure

Most games treat death as a full stop. Reventure treats it as a comma. Developed by the Spanish indie studio Pixelatto, this 2D pixel-art platformer opens with the oldest setup in the medium — a hero, a princess, an evil lord — and then quietly detonates every expectation you brought to it. The princess can wait. The evil lord is optional. What the game actually wants you to do is screw around, and it has built an absurdly clever machine to reward you for it.

The premise is easy to state: 100 different endings, and nearly any decision you make is a valid path to one of them. Grab the wrong sword and the game ends. Jump off the wrong cliff and the game ends — differently. Eat a suspicious mushroom, betray an ally, wander home and go back to bed, and each time the credits roll on a unique, usually hilarious conclusion. This isn’t a game you beat. It’s a game you exhaust, ending by ending, until the tracker fills up.

Pixelatto is not a household name, and Reventure isn’t trying to be a blockbuster. It launched on June 4, 2019, and settled into a comfortable position as a cult favorite — the kind of low-cost, high-personality release that word-of-mouth was built to surface. It carries a Metascore of 84, and that reputation is earned, not inflated by a small sample of superfans.

What separates Reventure from the crowded field of “quirky indie comedy games” is structural discipline. The humor isn’t pasted on top of the mechanics; it is the mechanic. Every joke is a system, every system is a joke, and the whole thing runs on a loop that turns idle curiosity into genuine progression. It respects your intelligence enough to hide most of its best content and trust you to go looking.

• 100 Endings, No Filler: Almost every object, NPC, ledge, and questionable life choice can trigger a distinct ending. Many are deaths. Many are jokes. A surprising number are both.
• The Groundhog Day Loop: When the world resets, you keep your items and — crucially — your knowledge. Progression is permanent even when the world isn’t, so each run starts you smarter and better-equipped than the last.
• A Dense, Compact Open World: The map is small by design, but layered with secrets, environmental puzzles, hidden characters, unlockable costumes, and power-ups that reshape where you can go and what you can do.
• The Ending Tracker: An in-game hint and checklist system logs what you’ve found and gently nudges you toward what you’ve missed — the difference between playful discovery and frustrated wiki-hunting.
• Pop-Culture Density: References are packed in tight, from gaming in-jokes to broader cultural nods, rewarding players who notice things.

The Gameplay Loop

Reventure’s central invention is that it makes quitting the quest into the quest. Traditional games punish deviation — stray from the golden path and you’re wasting time. Here, straying is the content. That inversion is the entire design philosophy, and Pixelatto commits to it with a rigor most comedy games never bother with.

Here’s how it works in principle. You start with nothing but a vague heroic mandate. You wander. You die — say, by walking into a bottomless pit. The screen flashes an ending card, gives it a cheeky name, and drops you back at the start. But now that pit is logged. You know where it is, you know what’s near it, and you probably grabbed an item on the way. Next run, that item lets you cross a gap you couldn’t before, which leads to a new area, which contains a new object, which unlocks a new ending, which teaches you something about the next area. The loop compounds. It’s a roguelike’s permanence grafted onto a puzzle box, and the fusion is genuinely smart.

The strength is in how knowledge and items reinforce each other. The game never gates you behind grinding or luck. It gates you behind understanding. When you finally chain together a five-step sequence to reach some ridiculous, well-hidden ending, the payoff is real — you didn’t get lucky, you figured it out. Reventure understands that the best puzzle is one where the solution lives in your head, not your inventory.

The Comedy Engine

Comedy is the hardest thing to sustain in a long-form medium, and Reventure’s answer is volume plus surprise. Because endings arrive constantly — some within seconds of a run starting — the game keeps a rapid comedic tempo that most narrative titles can’t touch. You’re never more than a minute or two from the next payoff. The writing is sharp, self-aware without being smug, and willing to mock the very genre conventions it’s built on.

There’s a real design lesson buried here: by making failure cheap and fast, Pixelatto removes the fear that normally stops players from experimenting. You’ll deliberately do dumb things because you want to see what happens, and the game almost always has an answer ready. That’s the loop feeding the comedy feeding the loop.

Where the Friction Creeps In

Reventure is not flawless, and the cracks show in its back half. The first 50 or 60 endings pour out of you — you’re tripping over them, laughing, chaining discoveries. But the long tail is a different game. The final stretch of endings can turn obtuse, demanding precise, multi-step sequences or knowledge of obscure interactions that stop being funny and start being tedious. The tracker helps, but it can only point you toward that an ending exists, not always make the hunt enjoyable.

This is the honest cost of a 100-ending design: the difficulty curve of discovery isn’t smooth. Novelty is front-loaded. Once the “oh, THAT works?” reflex wears off, some players will drift away well before 100%, and that’s a reasonable place to stop. The last stretch asks for a completionist’s patience the earlier hours never demanded.

The pixel art is clean, expressive, and functional — this is not a game chasing painterly beauty, and it shouldn’t be. The visual language is built for readability and comic timing. Sprites telegraph intent, hazards read instantly, and death animations are built to land their jokes with the crispness of a good sight gag. The aesthetic is charming rather than ambitious, and that’s the correct call for a game this dependent on clarity and pace.

The design also demands speed: a game built on constant resets needs near-instant restarts and zero friction between attempts, and the structure here is built around exactly that. Any stutter between a fatal decision and its payoff would sap the comedic rhythm the whole design depends on. The UI and tracker are unobtrusive and legible, doing their job without cluttering the small, dense screen. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, which suits its pick-up-and-put-down rhythm.

On Steam, this is the natural home. Keyboard-and-mouse or, better, a controller gives you the precise platforming input the tighter endings demand, and the larger screen makes the dense map and pixel detail easier to parse. The snappy reset loop suits a desktop setup where you can settle in for a long, experimental sit.

On Nintendo Switch, Reventure fits beautifully. This is close to the ideal handheld game: pick-up-and-play runs, bite-sized endings, and a natural stopping point every couple of minutes. The Switch’s portability plays directly to the game’s short-session rhythm — it’s well suited to the couch or the commute. Physical buttons on both platforms sidestep the precision problems that virtual controls invite.

A word of warning that applies wherever virtual buttons are the only option: touch controls are the weak link. Any version relying on them makes the precision-platforming endings noticeably more frustrating than they need to be. If you have the choice, play this with physical buttons. On Steam and Switch, you do, so this is a non-issue on the two platforms that matter here.

Reventure is a small game with a big idea, executed with more discipline than its goofy exterior lets on. Pixelatto took the single most demoralizing moment in gaming and rebuilt an entire progression system around it, and the result is a title that’s funnier and smarter than its price tag suggests. It doesn’t overstay its welcome — arguably it slightly does, in that punishing final stretch — but the core loop is a legitimately clever piece of design that more studios should study.

We rate it a solid pick for the right audience. Buy it. Chase 60 or 70 endings. Laugh the whole way. And feel no guilt about walking away before 100 — the game turned your failures into the point, and stopping when you’ve had your fill is just one more ending it happily allows.