A bird falls from the sky, landing belly up, followed by another. And another. And another. Soon, a writhing wave of inky black creatures washes over them, trapping a woman in a red cloak and her two wolf companions within. When it passes, the elder wolf lies dead, its cub nuzzling sadly at its body.
Putting an animal in danger is kind of a cheat code for drawing big emotions out of your story’s audience. Neva, the latest game from Gris developer Nomada Studio starts with an animal’s demise and reminds you as often as possible that your remaining canine companion could suffer the same fate at any moment, right until an ostentatiously heartstring-tugging finale. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but Neva seems to take for granted that its adorable wolf will be enough to keep players invested, even in the absence of much else to hold onto.
Baby Steps
At the outset of the game, Neva and her protector Alba, your character, are walking through a vast forest. In open fields, you can see far into the distance, to a looming mountain past a sea of trees, all illustrated in a lush watercolor style. In more cramped confines, the green mass of plants clashes with the pitch black of the game’s enemies, whose tendrils looping through the foliage make an unnerving sight. It’s breathtaking, conveying the immensity of nature and the tragedy of its corruption, while highlighting how small the game’s protagonists are in the face of the task before them. The stunning sights of Neva’s opening easily match the most gorgeous environments I’ve seen in any game.
In that opening chapter, comprising Neva and Alba’s first summer alone, you navigate the forest with the tiny cub following behind. At one point in the game’s opening moments, I came to a gap I could easily cross, but Neva hesitated. I moved on too fast, leaving Neva to attempt the jump alone, only to cling momentarily to the side of the hill she was aiming for before falling. My breath caught in my throat at seeing the poor thing struggling, and as Neva approached the jump again, I pressed a button to call encouragingly for her, then pressed it again as she clung to the same spot as before to pull her up. It reminded me a bit of the caring yet wordless relationship between Ico’s protagonists, and foreshadowed a game about two characters helping each other through their immense struggle.
Growing Pains
I never felt quite as good about Neva again. The tiny but effective mechanical flourish of making you help Neva with her jump is never really iterated on. Instead, most of the game is made up of platforming and combat that are both decent but uninspired. Glowing flowers scattered around Neva’s levels offer totally optional platforming challenges to reach, but outside of those, most of the game’s obstacles can be overcome with the same few moves — jumping between handholds on two opposing walls, or double-jumping and air-dashing with the proper rhythm to cross pits.
When Neva does branch out with its platforming, it’s for all-too-brief detours. Mechanical twists pop up and fizzle out before they can be fully explored, like a sequence that requires you to watch your character and her reflection at the same time to find a path forward. Perfectly executing a particularly tricky sequence or playing with the all-too-short twists introduced throughout feels satisfying, but most of the game’s action is too languid to elicit much response at all.
Combat likewise grows stale quickly. A simple three-hit combo and a downward strike in the air are the extent of your abilities for most of the game. Neva’s most common way of increasing difficulties is either to add more enemies or keep you in a confined space. Bosses and other larger enemies look impressive, but only in the game’s final act do they start feeling mechanically compelling. It’s all too easy to accidentally hurt yourself by running into their massive bodies — especially given the camera’s frustrating habit of zooming out so far that your character is little more than a speck at the bottom of your screen.
Straying From the Pack
For how much the game is ostensibly about the relationship between its two characters, Neva rarely feels like she has a life of her own. As you progress through the game, she quickly ages from a scared cub to a formidable adult. Where once she followed behind you, she soon grows to lead the way, becoming aggressive and independent enough to join in on your fight against the forest’s supernatural enemies. Partway through the game, you even gain the ability to control Neva directly, ordering her to leap and attack whether in combat or to help solve puzzles. The battles and platforming challenges that follow are undoubtedly more engaging because of that, but it leaves Neva feeling less like a living creature and more like a tool to be used. When you’re briefly separated from your companion later, the impact comes from losing access to an attack, rather than the emotional sting of no longer having your friend by your side.
Like its predecessor, Neva tells its story wordlessly (if you don’t count Alba calling Neva’s name), relying mostly on its music and visual design to convey emotion. But after its opening chapter, Neva begins borrowing the visual language of Gris so much that it feels impossible to avoid comparing the two, and that language feels ill-suited for the story Neva wants to tell.
After the game’s first chapter, you’ll start spending more time away from the verdant forest floor to climb trees stretching into the clouds and delve into catacombs beneath the earth. As you do, you’ll also leave behind the gorgeously overgrown aesthetic of the natural world for more surreal environments. Impossible floating plants and broken stone bridges replace the grassy hills and cliffs you traversed before, but rendered in a style that’s more sparse and less appealing. The screen fills with vivid colors like ink spreading in water. These are all common visual motifs in Gris, but where they fit that game’s metaphorical journey of self-healing, they feel out of place here.
Neva is on some level a game about parenthood, preserving nature, and coming to terms with the cycles of birth and loss. But by leaving behind the physical spaces of the natural world in favor of the surreal and non-literal, it dulls that message. Neva flounders in the space between metaphor and reality, never finding its footing in either, making it hard to pick either a concrete story or poetic significance out of that middle space.
Neva ultimately feels at odds with itself, trying to be too much at once. Its combat and platforming are competent, but not enough to carry the game on their own. Neva’s story seems to be reaching after pure emotional appeal and a more concrete tale at once, but landing awkwardly between them. While the sense of Alba and Neva’s connection is enchanting at first, the game loses focus on their relationship as it wears on. Even its stunning art — the best part of Neva by far — is stuck halfway between some of the most gorgeous depictions of nature I’ve ever seen in a game and less successful dives into surreal yet sparse environments. Maybe I’m being cold-hearted, but even its adorable wolf cub couldn’t keep me interested for long. Neva has its moments when everything briefly clicks, but in the end it takes a half-step in too many directions at once.
6/10
Neva launches October 15 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Inverse was provided with a PC copy for this review.
INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.
