TEVI

There is a point, a few hours into TEVI’s structure, when it stops behaving like a metroidvania and starts behaving like a fighting game. A boss fills the screen with a lattice of pink projectiles. The dagger is mid-swing. Two floating companions are auto-firing magic into the gap just opened. The combo counter climbs, and the game is asking for two contradictory things at once: dodge everything, and never stop attacking.

That contradiction is the whole design thesis. TEVI comes from CreSpirit and GemaYue, the small Taiwanese team behind 2016’s cult favorite Rabi-Ribi, with character art from illustrator Ein Lee. Rabi-Ribi was a curiosity — a cutesy exploration platformer that ambushed players with brutal danmaku boss fights, and developed a devoted following precisely because nobody expected the bait-and-switch. TEVI is what happens when that team stops treating the bullet-hell layer as a surprise and builds the entire game around it from the first frame.

You play Tevi, a bunny-eared tinkerer chasing down artifacts called Astral Gears across a hand-drawn world of more than 40 interconnected areas. She fights with a dagger and an absurdly oversized wrench. She’s shadowed by two floating familiars, Celia and Sable, who function as orbitars — the term is lifted from shoot-‘em-ups, and it’s the right one, because they behave like Gradius options grafted onto a melee character.

The market positioning is unusual. This isn’t competing with Hollow Knight on atmosphere or Ori on presentation. It’s competing on mechanical density — a genre-blend that theoretically shouldn’t work, aimed at players who want Devil May Cry‘s combo pressure and Touhou‘s pattern reading in the same input. The Steam audience has responded warmly, and the game found its niche quickly. But the fit is narrow by design, and that narrowness defines both its appeal and its limits.

• Melee-plus-orbitar combat: Tevi’s dagger and wrench cover close range while Celia and Sable handle ranged magic and support. The two systems layer rather than alternate — both are managed simultaneously, not swapped between.
• Combo meter with teeth: Chaining uninterrupted attacks builds a multiplier that meaningfully scales damage output. Get hit, get greedy in the wrong window, and it collapses. This is the mechanic that pushes players toward aggression inside a genre that traditionally rewards patience.
• BREAK stagger on 20+ multi-phase bosses: Sustained pressure fills a stagger gauge that opens a punish window. It converts boss fights from endurance tests into rhythm puzzles with a clear risk/reward beat.
• Sigil loadouts and 300+ items: A slot-based equipment system that genuinely reshapes builds — melee bruiser, magic-forward, evasion-tank, or glass cannon are all viable, not cosmetic variations.
• RPG progression layered on metroidvania structure: Leveling, crafting, and traversal abilities that gate and ungate the map in the classic fashion.
• 50+ voiced characters and a 70+ track soundtrack: Presentation investment far beyond the norm for a team this size.

The Gameplay Loop

Most metroidvanias resolve combat in one or two hits per enemy and save their real difficulty for platforming and bosses. TEVI doesn’t. Ordinary trash mobs here are combo fodder — objects meant to be juggled, launched, and chained through to keep the meter alive. The moment-to-moment loop is closer to an arena action game that happens to have a map screen.

This is the game’s best idea and its most demanding one. The combo meter functions as an anti-defensive incentive, and in a bullet-hell, that’s an unusual tension. Touhou-lineage games train players to treat the hitbox as sacred, to prioritize survival above all. TEVI punishes that instinct economically — play safe and damage output craters, fights drag on, and more patterns get eaten than would be by pressing forward. The design pushes players into the danger zone and then makes them earn their way out. When it clicks, the feel is aggressive, fast, and legitimately skill-expressive in a way very few games in this genre manage.

The Difficulty Question

TEVI’s onboarding friction is real, and it’s the single most common complaint in the player base. The bullet patterns escalate quickly, and the game assumes a genre literacy that most metroidvania players simply don’t have. Coming from Hollow Knight, instincts are wrong — attacks read as discrete telegraphed events, and TEVI keeps handing over sustained screen-filling geometry that has to be parsed spatially, in motion.

The difficulty settings, running from casual to punishing, are a real accommodation rather than a token one. But there’s a structural wrinkle worth naming: the RPG leveling system quietly doubles as a difficulty valve. Stuck on a boss? Grind a few levels, re-slot the Sigils, come back stronger. That’s a legitimate escape hatch, and it makes the game far more accessible than Rabi-Ribi ever was. It also means the skill curve is negotiable in a way that purists may find dilutes the achievement. We land on the side of the design — an optional path around a wall is better than a wall — but it does mean two players can finish TEVI having played meaningfully different games.

Build Systems and the Theorycrafting Trap

The Sigil system is deep. Perhaps too deep for its own presentation. With 300+ items and equipment pieces feeding into a slot-based loadout, the combinatorial space is enormous, and the game is not always great at communicating what a given change actually does to the numbers. Players who enjoy spreadsheet-adjacent optimization will find a lot to chew on. Players who just want a good build will spend more time in menus than they’d like, and the UI doesn’t do enough to surface comparative impact at a glance.

The Map Problem

Forty-plus interconnected areas sounds generous. In practice, TEVI trades density for sprawl. The great metroidvania maps are tight, legible, and full of shortcuts that reward mental mapping. TEVI’s is large, and while the individual room design is strong, the connective tissue between regions asks for more backtracking than the traversal toolkit comfortably supports. There are stretches — particularly mid-game, before the movement abilities that make the world flow are collected — where it’s covering known ground with nothing new to think about. That’s dead time in a game that’s otherwise relentless.

The Story

Here’s where we get blunt. TEVI’s narrative is overwritten to the point of obstruction. The dialogue is voluminous, the pacing meanders, and the anime archetype writing lands with a thud far more often than it charms. Fifty-plus voiced characters is an impressive production stat and a narrative liability — the cast is too large to develop and too talkative to skip past comfortably. There’s an interesting premise buried in the Astral Gears plot, and it’s smothered under cutscenes that stop a fast, aggressive action game dead in its tracks for minutes at a time. A tighter script would have made this a better game by subtraction alone. It’s the clearest evidence that this is a small team without an editorial layer, and it’s the main thing standing between TEVI and the genre’s top tier.

The hand-drawn art is strong. Sprite work is expressive and readable, which matters enormously here — in a bullet-hell, legibility is a performance feature, not an aesthetic one, and TEVI mostly wins that fight. Projectiles are designed to read clearly against backgrounds even when the screen is saturated. Character animation has weight and snap. Ein Lee’s designs are stylized in a way that will absolutely polarize on taste, but the execution is not in question.

The 70+ track soundtrack is the game’s quiet strength — driving, melodic, and consistently cited by players as a standout. It carries the combat’s rhythm in a way that makes the aggression feel earned.

As a design matter, a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the encounter-based structure depends on frame timing and input responsiveness — the things that actually determine whether a bullet-hell is fair — being treated as first-class concerns, which the build suggests they were.

On Steam, TEVI is the definitive version. Controller is strongly recommended over keyboard; the analog precision matters when threading tight patterns, and the melee-plus-orbitar juggling maps naturally to face buttons and triggers. Higher resolutions and refresh rates give more visual information per frame, which in this genre translates directly into survival.

On Nintendo Switch, the game’s 2D, pixel-dense art is well suited to handheld play — this is the kind of game that doesn’t strain modest hardware, and the run-based, encounter-to-encounter structure suits short sessions. The trade-off is screen real estate. Dense bullet patterns on a handheld display demand more from the eyes, and the hardest difficulty tiers are meaningfully harder in handheld mode purely as a function of visual scale. Play the punishing settings docked or on PC.

TEVI is a specialist’s game that found a broader audience than its design strictly serves. The combat is the real achievement — an honest genre fusion rather than a marketing one, executed with a precision that small studios rarely hit and large ones rarely attempt. The BREAK system, the combo meter, and the orbitar layering interlock into something that plays like little else on the market.

What holds it back isn’t ambition. It’s restraint. A sprawling map that should have been tightened, a script that should have been cut in half, a cast that should have been a third the size. Every one of TEVI’s flaws is a more problem, which is a better problem to have than the alternative — but it’s still a problem, and it’s why this sits below the genre’s very best rather than among it.

Buy it for the fights. Hold the skip button through everything else.