Backlog Bingo 2025: Rebel Transmute

Rebel Transmute is a 2024 Metroidvania from solo developer Evan Tor.

This game is...fine. It certainly feels juuuust a bit unfinished, and I would learn after finishing it that there's a content patch scheduled for January 6th that streamlines a lot of the rough edges of travel and redesigns some bits of the map. This is probably necessary, as this game suffers quite intensely from what I call the Pseudoregalia Problem: it is quite easy to end up somewhere that you aren't quite supposed to be, but that you can technically be if you abuse some nonsense or do weird speedrun tech, making it really REALLY easy to softlock. There's an upgrade that lets you bounce off enemies as platforms, but shooting your gun downwards into an enemy also bounces you off them and refreshes your airdash, so just shooting things is often enough to get you to a platform but not back because you've killed everything on the way. Oops.

If "you can attack downwards to refresh your airdash to do hard platforming intentionally or unintentionally" sounds a bit Hollow Knight, you aren't alone: this game broadly has a bit of a feeling of "we have Hollow Knight at home". There's a boss named Blood Cocoon that has a phase two in which it hatches a giant moth that flies to the top of a room above many two-character-width platforms and rains lasers down that make you do a ton of fiddly evasion, there's an upgrade that is just an infinite dash off a wall in a horizontal line that can be interrupted by airdashing, you drop a health orb on the ground where you die and have to go get it to be back to full capacity, you have a set of "augments" that take varying numbers of points to equip up to some maximum that you can increase with items, the aforementioned gun pogoing, etc etc. There is a lot of Hollow Knight blood here.

Narratively, it's...fine, like, points for some anticapitalism, but there's not a ton to the story. I actually bought the game thinking that the protag was looking for her wife, but she's looking for her mom. So it's not actually gay, but I'm not going to hold that against the game since that's just me failing at basic research. :p

Overall, like...yeah, it's fine. It is really impressive as a solo project, and it's impressive brodly seeing how far solo Metroidvaniae have come since Cave Story, which was already impressive.

This is probably where I explain the Doll Scale, at the risk of causing Doll themselves to experience the horrors of being perceived. A game gets one point each for:

This is a firm 2/5 on the Doll Scale: there's nothing wrong with it, I enjoyed it, it gets the first two points just fine. But there's no reason for me to suggest this over a lot of other games in a super crowded genre, so it's just kinda...there. It's okay! That's fine!

There's only one other Metroidvania on my card this year, so it'll probably be a minute before we see that one.