Wren’s Resurgence is a 2D Metroidvania platformer by Australian developer Soliloquy Games, where you play as rōnin warrior Wren as she fights through Yokai-infested realms to rescue her sister, Swan. Unfortunately, this article is more of a first impression than a full review, as I was unable to progress more than roughly halfway through the game due to a large number of technical issues that prevented me from reaching the end. While many of the bugs I experienced will hopefully be ironed out in the coming weeks and months, the game as I played it in late December 2024 and early January 2025 was in an especially rough shape and would be difficult to recommend to anyone who prefers a more technically polished experience.
Set in a fantastical world inspired by Japanese mythology, you play as a warrior named Wren as she resists the forces of the Yokai which has enslaved humanity. After her sister, Swan, is captured, she must go on an adventure and hone her abilities in order to rescue her family member.
From its pixel-art visual aesthetic to its fairly straightforward plot, Wren’s Resurgence is deliberately going for a more retro sort of experience. While I like a detailed narrative as much as the next gamer, I didn’t find the lack of depth too much of an issue. That said, the technical issues I experienced served to make the plot somewhat disorienting. Whenever I backtracked into a previous area, the area’s introductory cutscene would play, regardless of whether I had completed the main objective already. This made me second-guess myself frequently regarding whether I had actually entered a new location or not and whether the game had actually saved my progress properly.
To combat the Yokai threat, Wren starts off with her trusty katana. As her adventure progresses, she can obtain new weapons and magical abilities. There is an impressive number of varied and intricately designed Yokai foes to defeat, ranging from flaming wolves, giant cyclops apes and creepy spider people. While the fundamentals of attacking enemies and countering their attacks when the yellow symbol appeared onscreen weren’t overly complex, I still found combat quite unbalanced. Wren is surprisingly fragile and her health bar (called Omamori) can be whittled down in seconds from enemy attacks, particularly when foes are able to apply burning damage.
There is also no way of recovering Wren’s Omamori that I could find outside of resting at save points. I purchased upgrades in the store which promised that it would allow me to recover Omamori but they did not seem to have any effect. I am all for a wide range of difficulty modes to make games more approachable for a variety of gamers. That said, the fact that the God Mode difficulty toggle (which makes Wren immune to most sources of damage) is placed directly above the Continue button in the pause menu rather than placed in the options menu like most games would do suggested that the developers intended strategically toggling God Mode on and off was the intended mode of play in Wren’s Resurgence, rather than rebalancing it so Wren could recover health during and in-between fights with healing items or spells.
As you defeat bosses, you unlock a variety of new movement abilities, such as allowing Wren to double jump, climb up walls and fire her energy blasts upwards and downwards to destroy barriers. To the game’s credit, getting around feels relatively fluid, with running, wall-jumping and climbing around feeling mostly seamless (until I clipped inside a platform, or when the game would often crash when transitioning to a new area).
I just wish actually navigating felt more intuitive. You are given a map screen in the pause menu fairly early on, however actually getting it to work and display useful information felt like a dice roll. Sometimes when I was in an area, the map screen would show where I was. On the other hand, other times when I was in the same area later on it would just be blank, or show Wren’s icon devoid of any other data to help orient myself. Wren’s Resurgence is divided into 10 different areas, and while most of them are quite large, there is fortunately a fast travel feature that mostly worked (by which I mean it was bugged in one of the areas and would only work in one direction for some reason, forcing me to have to leave the Toxic Wastes area on foot every time).
This brings me to the bugs, both game-breaking and minor. My early experience (playing Wren’s Resurgence on Steam Deck, my laptop and my desktop PC interchangeably) was beset by multiple progression-halting errors, wherein I was unable to reload by save file without the game crashing to the desktop.
While those major bugs (along with a couple of minor ones) were eventually patched, even into mid-January 2025 I was finding that bosses would become stuck in walls mid-fight or respawn after I had defeated them, interacting with certain objects or entering certain areas would cause the game to freeze, and the lack of a useful map screen and the constantly repeating cutscenes made it unclear to me how to progress or if it was even saving my progress properly whenever I was accomplishing anything.
I really wanted to like Wren’s Resurgence; I am a big fan of both Metroidvania platformers and Japanese mythology, and hypothetically a game bringing those elements together would be really appealing. Perhaps one day Wren’s Resurgence can become that game. If its map screen reliably indicated where you are in relation to your environment and it was clear how to progress, exploration would feel more meaningful rather than just be fruitless backtracking due to becoming lost.
The fact that I was not confident I would even be able to reload my save file again in between play sessions (and experienced multiple crashes and freezes even while playing) also emphasised the lack of polish on display. Unfortunately, the technical condition of the version of the game I played for review was unable to be completed and, until the game’s technical problems are ironed out so that it is stable and its mechanics work correctly, it isn’t something I can enjoy nor recommend to other Metroidvania fans at this stage.
About the Author
Tom Quirk
he/him
Tom Quirk plays a lot of video games, but when he isn't, he is reading fantasy novels and watching way more television than is healthy.
