Repella Fella really surprised me. I went into the demo not really having much expectations. It blew me away so much I went and bought the full game. It has fantastic humour. It can also be really grim and I loved that. It gives you many choices throughout and often times those choices had consequences I had not really thought about much. More than a few times I was surprised just how well thought out some sequences were in terms of taking into account what would really happen. The story itself is fairly well done. It throws a lot at you in terms of factions, characters, lore, etc but it also gives you a really detailed in game guide to all of it. The lockpick mini game is a decent although it would have been nice to have as way of figuring out which tumbler to try next without guessing. The various death scenes you can encounter for your character were inventive, hilarious, and didn’t penalize you too much. I didn’t like how you pretty much had to have subtitles on but they didn’t fully do their job. With subtitles off you miss all of the foreign language spoken but with them on it only translates some of them with others only saying “foreign language” and on top of that you also now have to see all of the English spoken that I didn’t need or want. I thought the hacking mini game was mixed as well. It has a decent premise but it was really easily to get penalized by picking the wrong colour too early with no way of knowing beforehand. The music and voice acting were both well done. I thought that while the story was perfectly setup for a sequel at the same time this game ends just as things were getting really interesting. I had no idea the story was going to be split up like this going in and I feel it should be called “episode 1” as there is little in the way of any conclusion to it. The graphics had great style and it was like watching a cartoon that I had more control over.
I played Repella Fella on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches. There were only two graphics options which were a fullscreen toggle and a toggle for “shitty laptop mode”. The game has checkpoints for save games and also the ability to save whenever you want. Sadly though there is only once save slot for each. You can pause and skip cutscenes. Performance was fantastic overall although I did encounter a few times where the game had a lag spike for a split second. I couldn’t monitor frame rate with this game but outside of those few split seconds the game didn’t seem to have any lag. The game seemed to use a lot of system RAM given the graphical quality but so long as you have the RAM to spare it isn’t an issue.
Disk Space Used: 8.7GB
Game Version Played: 1.0
Game Settings Used: Fullscreen on, Shitty Laptop Mode off
GPU Usage: 5-23 %
VRAM Usage: 1128-2462 MB
CPU Usage: 8-28 %
System RAM Usage: 5.9-7.3 GB
While I had a few nitpicks the positive parts to Repella Fella really outshine my complaints. It had me laughing most of the way through. It has deeper lore and world building than many other games. It showed it could do comedy, drama, action, and anything else it tried. I finished the game in seven hours and eleven minutes. I paid $23.72 CAD for it and given the quality I would say it is worth even more despite the story ending too soon. If you want a side scroller with some bite to it I would at least try out the demo.
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | Gigabyte RX 7800 XT 16GB | Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB | Solus | Dasharo 1.1.4 | Mate 1.28.2 | Kernel 6.12.21-316.current | Mesa 25.0.3