It took all of 30 seconds with Neva to become convinced it was going to break my heart, I just haven't figured out how. A side-scrolling, hacky-slashy-dashy platformer from the developers behind Gris, Neva puts you in the shoes of a red-cloaked girl and her faithful hound, a fantastical wolf/deer creature named, well, Neva.
I am very worried something will happen to Neva, or to the red-cloaked girl. After all, how many self-respecting game devs can resist the urge, upon giving you a canine pal to love and bond with, to tear it away from you somewhere near the end? Heck, something terrible already happens at the game's beginning: Neva comes into your care after their parent—a great, majestic wolf-reindeer-beast—is overcome and killed by sinister, gooey forces.
I just don't see this ending well.
Hop, skip, jump, slice
But that's all speculation. In the 30 minutes or so I got with the game, at least, nothing especially terrible happened. That is, unless you count my absolutely pathetic performance against the endboss.
Like Gris, Neva is a 2D platformer with beautiful hand-drawn art and soft, melancholic vibes. In my demo, I spent the vast majority of my time dashing and jetéing from gorgeous platform to gorgeous platform, occasionally pausing and running to rescue and/or console Neva, who has a habit of getting stuck in the mud or menaced into immobility by foes.
It's not anything you haven't experienced before: The process of using your dash and jump charges to cleverly navigate across levels filled with things that want to hurt you is familiar to anyone who's touched a 2D platformer in the last decade. But it's well done and it feels good. Dropping off a ledge, timing a dash charge to thread my way between enemies beneath and above me, then popping a jump to bound up to the platform on the other side of the screen feels as good here as it did 14 years ago in Super Meat Boy. Heck, it felt good (in much gentler form) in Gris.
But unlike Gris, Neva also hands you a sword and invites you to go ham with it, hacking and slashing your way through enemies and obstacles scattered across its platform-heavy levels. Combat isn't too complex—you slash your enemies when they're open and roll through them when they attack, this isn't Dead Cells—but it feels good to bob and weave between your foes.
Unlike Gris, Neva also hands you a sword and invites you to go ham with it
Actually, I take that back. Combat isn't too complex unless we're in bossfight mode, where the game actually puts up a bit of a fight. After absolutely breezing through every preceding section of the game, my demo concluded with me hitting a brick wall against the big, beefy enemy it throws against you at the end.
Now, to be fair, I was absolutely on tilt—there's no reason it should have taken me any more than two or three tries except that I got in my own head—but Neva isn't afraid to throw things at you that ramp up the challenge now and then. The boss required tighter timing and quicker pattern recognition than any enemy I'd fought up to that point.
A dog's life
My demo ended with my (eventual) triumph over the boss, and I'm curious to see more. In the game's early stages, Neva isn't much more than a fluffy pal you occasionally have to pull out of danger, but the devs suggested that might change as the game goes on, with Neva gaining size and abilities that eventually turn that tale on its head: Your hound will begin looking after you rather than you looking after it.
Which sounds like it's just what the doctor ordered. Neva is gorgeous and, for the half-hour I spent with it, was a pretty good time, but nothing I saw in that time felt particularly unique in a mechanical sense. I suspect that might change as the game continues to unfold and Neva gets bigger and bolder. You know, at least until the inevitable tragedy strikes.
Neva releases later this year. You can find it over on Steam.
