ReSetna

I want to be honest with you: the first zone nearly lost me. Polis_13, ReSetna's opening district, is all crumbled asphalt and rust, and the early combat feels like it hasn't yet decided what it wants to be. Stick with it past that uncertain hour and something genuinely interesting starts to surface. The world opens, the traversal loosens up, and a post-apocalyptic machine civilization told through degraded text logs and scattered codex entries begins to feel like it has actual weight behind it. This is a small Croatian studio's debut, and the seams show. But so does the care. At its mechanical core, ReSetna is a 2.5D action metroidvania where you play as a robot warrior awakened to stop a mysterious Signal that's driving other machines mad. Your drone companion IXA provides both narrative texture and in-combat utility, offering heals and hack assists at critical moments. The combat runs on three unlockable weapons: twin axes for fast combo chains, a naginata with longer reach, and a heavier sabre that rewards parry-counterattack timing. All three feel meaningfully different, though players who find the most powerful option early may never go back to the others. The parry system is genuinely satisfying when it lands, and the seven bosses are the game's clear highlight: pattern-read, punish, survive. None of them felt cheap, even when they took several tries. Normal enemies are rarely threatening on their own, but carelessness will get you killed. The real personality lives in the chip upgrade system, a Tetris-grid mechanic where tetromino-shaped chips slot into a fixed board. Weapon chips add effects like ranged slashes to the axe or lightning arcs to the naginata. Ability chips unlock explosive dodges and wall-jump variants. General chips handle health and damage recovery. The spatial puzzle of fitting the shapes together creates quiet, satisfying micro-decisions about the kind of fighter you want to be. The chip pool isn't quite deep enough to force genuinely hard tradeoffs, but it's the system that ages best across a full run. New traversal abilities unlock in classic metroidvania fashion, and going back through earlier zones with double jump and air-dash opens shortcuts and secrets that reward patient explorers. Platforming starts gentle and escalates into some properly demanding sequences late in the run. The rough patches are real and worth naming. At launch the game shipped with enough bugs and UI friction that early reviewers were split. The team responded with a sustained patch campaign, issuing multiple substantial updates that reworked the final boss, redesigned the Xynexis chase sequence, added a minimap, overhauled weapon animations, and rebuilt the combat feel from the ground up. If you're buying post-update, you're getting a meaningfully improved game compared to launch-day impressions. What lingers is the soundtrack, which can drop out between zones in a way that feels less like artistic silence and more like a loading seam. And the world lore, delivered partly in a stylized Leetspeak dialect, is absorbing in concept but occasionally difficult to track without a notepad. The narrative knows where it's going. Getting there is sometimes murky. For the metroidvania player who has finished Hollow Knight and wants something smaller and rougher around the edges, ReSetna holds up. It won't redefine the genre or shake you at midnight. But there's a handmade quality to the zone design and a genuine satisfaction in watching the developers actively listen and rebuild in real time. Sometimes that story is worth the ticket.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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