Bendy and the Dark Revival is a fun time with a decent story and an incredibly strong artistic vision. As someone who shat on the original came constantly and had it as an inside joke of sorts in a friend group I'm it, It's hard for me to take that seriously, but I think that speaks volume for the fact that I could enjoy it despite that. It is pretty derivative but it uses those elements to make a generally fun game, even if it's inspirations are blatantly obvious.

The gameplay can be hit or miss. For context, I did play on hard mode, which might've tainted my experience slightly, but even then I think there should be a bit of improvement. The combat itself is fine, I have little issues with it, and most of those come from hard mode. My main issue is the stealth. It's a great idea on paper, but I don't think its ever taken advantage of. Lost Ones are almost always placed in groups, so you never have a good opportunity to sneak up and take them down, so you're left to just flail around and kill them. There's zero punishment for dying to them either so you can just throw yourself at them over and over until you win. I wouldn't mind this too much if it was designed so that you could sneak past the enemies too, but it's not. You're pretty much forced to kill them all. The area before you get your pipe is pretty much the only time you actually can stealth as the enemies are very limited.

However that brings me into another issue, hiding. For some reason they made it so you can't hide if you're being chased, which is such a strange decision. I get not wanting an easy escape button, but the simple solution is to make is so you can always hide, but if an enemy sees you hide, they'll force you out or kill you there, like how 99% of stealth games do it. I get what they were going for but there's already been a solution to this issue for 20 years.

The pacing in this game is also a little strange. The first two chapters are pretty boring. Not much happens here, and no interesting characters are introduced. The third chapter and beyond is when it starts to get truly interesting, with a bunch of new characters and set pieces. However it starts to falter off again near chapter 5, which is really painfully slow tedious. It starts out really good but after the first puzzle starts it becomes really boring. The Alice fight and the seeker maze are really slow and uninteresting, I was just begging for it to be over. Thankfully the end of the chapter and the game itself is really fucking good which overall made up for the slow bits.

The story itself is also pretty nice. It's nothing amazing, but for the mess that was BATIM's story, this game really runs with what it set up to make an actually interesting story with an ending that left me excited for what comes next. It's nothing to write home about but the concept is super interesting and it's overall pretty well executed, if a little confusing (though that's mostly for how BATIM told its original story).

One final note about this game is that it has so many great designs. The Seekers and fucking Shipahoy Dudley are so fucking good. The Ink Demon also got an entirely new design and its fantastic, miles better than the original and the leaked redesign from the merch. I love how he's slowly deviating and corrupting from Bendy's form more and more, and I'm excited to see how he looks in the final game. I wouldn't mind if they just didn't change it though honestly.

Overall, Bendy and the Dark Revival is just fun. It has its ups and downs, but its a massive improvement from the original, and it makes me actually excited for Bendy 3 instead of leaving a bad taste in my mouth like the first. If you were disappointed by the original Bendy and the Ink Machine but thought it had a lot of good ideas with just terrible execution, then I think you'll like this game.