TEVI review

last edited 2025-11-26

TEVI is a bullet hell linearvania that I first played in 2023/12. I had very high hopes because I played the demo before and loved it, but the full game disappointed me. A lot of the things I liked about it turned out to be misunderstandings that I had because I didn't play far enough into the demo (I only played the first area because once I thought I was going to love it I didn't want to get too far in before full release).

"Linearvania" definition

I did my first playthrough switching between Hard and Expert difficulty. I at first planned 100% completion and did a lot of optional exploring, but once I got disillusioned with the game I started doing less of that. I finished after 28 hours.

In 2025 I did a full playthrough on Expert++, which took 38 hours. My final opinion is that the game is just okay.

Combat

The combat system is way too complex. It has:

Several melee combos
12 types of ranged attacks
2 types of bombs you can drop
3 different invulerability-on-demand abilities that get charged in different ways; one of them also has 6 subtypes
over 100 sigils (equippable upgrades) to choose from, and in late game you will have more than 50 equipped at once, and some of them individually have bizarrely complex effects like "When combo count is below 7, using basic ground combo II will be followed by basic air combo II; Additionally, basic air combo I and basic air combo II attack speed +40% and both become a 2-hit attack"
2 different mechanics called knockback and blowback (the game never defines either or explains the difference between them)
rules about how damage scales as you continue as a combo so arcane that I haven't figured them out after 3 playthroughs
Over 100 status effects

It's so strange, I've never seen anything like this in another action game. I think even Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is less complex than TEVI.

Oh yeah, and the game often pauses itself *during boss fights* to explain new mechanics it's introducing.

Attacking is boring because it largely consists of repeating the same basic combo as long as the target can be hitstunned. Most of the other combos seem to just do way less damage than the basic combo. Bosses also have a "break" mechanic where every so often they get "broken" and become vulnerable to being hitstunned for much longer, so you get to spend 15 seconds just mashing buttons.

There is a mechanic that seems to happen in some circumstances where you do less damage if you keep using the same move, but as far as I can tell that just changes the optimal strategy to "use 1 of each combo when the boss is broken", not any more interesting.

I even looked up the TEVI speedrun world record to see if I was wrong about the best way to attack, but no, even they spent much of the game spamming the basic combo.

The hitstun rules are bad. Your melee attacks stun enemies only if they haven't already started an action, and aren't in the dominant state (shown by a red outline); so if an enemy starts an attack at the same time as yours, they won't take hitstun like you expected and you won't have enough time to react. This is effectively simultaneous turns, like in pvp fighting games.

Finally, like many bullet hell games, your hitbox is super small, much smaller than your sprite. In this case it causes problems because often you won't be hit by attacks even if you don't dodge, the projectiles just won't happen to pass through you. At the same time, dodging intentionally is super hard because of how many projectiles there are. This makes it sometimes feel like it's not worth trying to dodge and you should just keep attacking, which is sad.

That said, it's really cool that the game lets you actually see your hitbox. There's a setting that enables it.

Enemy design

Normal enemies have decent designs, but it doesn't matter much because they can usually be stunlocked to death so they don't get to do anything once you start hitting them.

As for the bosses, I'm really impressed with the size of their movesets. Actually, I think TEVI is the first game I've seen that goes *too* far in this direction... bosses have so many different attacks that I can't really learn them; sometimes on my 3rd try at a boss I see an attack I've never seen before. And the game's not great about making their telegraphs intuitive.

Despite the problems, boss design is its main strength, since not only are their movesets large and diverse, many individual moves are also designed in interesting ways, requiring you to track the movement of multiple objects and plan your movements well to dodge. Several bosses are fought in arenas with platforms, which adds depth to movement, and some have neat mechanics like deploying status effect bubbles, sometimes beneficial sometimes harmful, which let you choose whether to prioritize having the status effect or not over being in the best position to dodge attacks.

Exploration

Exploration in TEVI is much less enjoyable than in other metroidvanias I've played, for several reasons:

Level design incredibly hostile to it. TEVI is full of one-way passages: there's a fork, and you go explore one branch, but then find you can't get back to the fork the same way, you have to loop all the way around through 10 rooms you've already explored to get back to that fork. Often these are due to one-way platforms (platforms you can jump up through but then stand on); unlike almost every other game with such platforms, there is no way to fall through them. And sometimes one-way passages are even surprises, for example, jumping through a ceiling may immediately land you on one of these platforms with no way back down.

A ton of "secrets" that can only be found through massive trial and error. Some are through fake walls that disappear when you run into them, but look exactly the same as real walls, encouraging you to run into every wall to check for secrets. And slide into every wall, because sometimes the invisible passages are one tile tall, and jump into every wall, because sometimes they're off the ground, and drop a bomb on every tile of every floor, because sometimes that opens a secret passage. Most action platformers have this kind of problematic "secret", but TEVI is worse both because of how many it has and because of how many things you have to try on every tile to check it for secrets.

The map only shows rooms as featureless tiles, making them hard to recognize. It also often shows tiles as connected when it's actually a one-way passage, making it difficult to find a way to actually get from one place to another.

Upgrades, meta features, quality of life

TEVI has a crafting system where ingredients are gathered by grinding. One of the main things I liked about it during the demo was that it seemed to be a rare RPG without grinding. Alas, it's just money that isn't grindable. There's also an option to convert some crafting resources into random other ones, and this is nearly the only way to get some of the most important ones which can be used for crafting permanent upgrades, so it being random really sucks.

Overall though, most of your upgrades come from exploration, which is nice.

The save system seems to be *mostly* that of a traditional RPG, with saving only allowed at marked points, and returning to a save undoes everything since then, including the use of consumables. But there's also autosaves that happen with no clear notification at certain points, and *sometimes* returning to a save seems to keep certain things I've done since, like crafting items. It's confusing.

The game is very good about giving you checkpoints right before hard parts, and letting you skip cutscenes.

I very much appreciate that you can change difficulty inside a playthrough, but I don't appreciate that you can only do so at Tevi's bed, not from the menu. Sometimes, Tevi's bed can be far away or outright inaccessible until you complete an objective.

Story

First thing that bothers me about the story is the glorification of monarchy. Of course, glorifying monarchy is quite common in fantasy stories, but TEVI's case is worse, since it not only portrays monarchic rule as justified but also the queens as cool, beautiful, and likable people; and a past "rebellion" was supposedly the worst thing to ever happen to the world and characters can't stop talking about how bad it was and how the police fought so bravely to crush the rebellion; and at least twice it uses the word "anarchy" to describe this rebellion, a word which actually refers to just the lack of belief in a cult of violence that most people in real life happen to believe in.

Why you should be an anarchist

Now, let's move on to less ideological complaints. Tevi, the protagonist, is unlikable for the first half of the story. She's over-glorified, being the best at everything she does and the coolest and the bravest, and often praised by other characters and herself, and she never suffers. And she's a jerkass: she often shits on other characters, including her dad, who don't deserve it. She gets better in the second half of the story, but that doesn't make the first half more enjoyable.

Nearly every villain that Tevi defeats in a boss fight, she inexplicably lets walk away. Even if they just killed someone she cared about right in front of her. In one case, the same villain appears later doing more evil, and Tevi lets them go again.

I feel like the story refuses to take villainy seriously. Multiple villains are later used as allies without having changed at all, or even treated like friends by Tevi. There's even one who runs a murderous eugenics program that Tevi seeks out as an ally. The writers haven't forgotten, because Tevi brings it up in the meeting with her. It's just like the characters considers it not enough to render her an enemy.

Overall, the story is so bad that I started skipping some dialogue around halfway through, just skimming and reading the objective marker descriptions afterward.

There's also this conspicuous gender trend. Basically every male character is either a villain, a doofus, or often both. All the cool, glorified characters are female.

I do like the way angels and demons are portrayed: as two societies of human-like beings, not actually good and evil, but with the *aesthetics* of good and evil, and the culture of good and evil as seen by puritan morality. Demons being into debauchery while angels consider themselves too noble.