This indie game is more like a cross between Link to the Past and Mother 3, plus a big bucket of wholesomeness.

The three guys that make up Rainbite are from New Zealand, and Reverie isn’t ashamed of that at all! Not that it should be, but what I’m saying is that the story is based on a Maori legend, there are New Zealand flags and wildlife all over, and characters use plenty of slang and expressions particular to that culture.

Visually, Reverie very much seems to me to be saying: “what if Mother 3 was set on a small island in Aotearoa?”, which I find very charming. In gameplay terms it’s a simplified Zelda-like: your sword is now a cricket bat, and you have two item slots for a nerf gun, yo-yo, plastic spade, pet rock, snorkel, etc., and the ultimate optional equipment, the protective kahu.

The overworld is very homey and colourful, with friendly characters to chat to and the occasional sidequest. The enemies rarely seem threatening even when they are, and the dungeons are nice and varied in places like a hollow tree, a giant sandcastle, a multi-faith church basement, or a volcano. Within these dungeons the navigation and puzzles—the typical blocks, switches lasers, etc.—can get pretty head-scratching at times, more so than most Zelda games.; it’s not insurmountable, but an engaging challenge.

It’s clearly an indie effort and a labour of love. Relatively short (my full playthrough was 5 hours), but surely “sweet as”. It was also nice hunting down the feather collectibles and looking up the native birds of Aotearoa that they went with.

Originally I was aiming to play this on Vita, until the Switch rerelease added extra features that weren’t ported to the other releases. These include a harder difficulty, a new minigame, an achievement system, and a quick item swap, none of which I ended up being too fussed about, and in fact I forgot about the latter feature until writing this. So I would recommend this game, and any version would be fine.