Narvas

I went in expecting a throwaway budget shooter and came out with complicated feelings, which is more than most games in this price bracket manage. Narvas puts you in the boots of Mace, a scavenger turned reluctant planetary operative, and sends you sprinting across side-scrolling alien levels packed with enemy bots and boss encounters that demand you pay attention. The sci-fi premise is thin but functional: it hands you a reason to keep moving, then gets out of the way. The movement toolkit is genuinely ambitious for a small indie production. Mace can sprint, wall-climb, dodge, and teleport, and on paper that reads like a satisfying kit for a precision platformer. In practice, the controls are where Narvas earns its mixed reception. A recurring complaint from players is that the jump feels weighted toward the ground, with wall-jump windows that punish any hesitation. Aiming and movement sharing input space creates friction that compounds when the level design pushes you into tight, spike-laden corridors where a single misstep restarts your run. The bones of something fluid are here. They just haven't fully set yet. What rescues the experience from frustration, at least partially, is the randomised weapon mod system. Scattered throughout levels are gun modifications and ability buffs that drop unpredictably, nudging each run toward something a little different. Land a mod that synergises with a boss pattern and the game suddenly clicks into something arcade-satisfying. Land a useless drop before a hard section and the difficulty spikes in ways that feel unfair rather than designed. It is a roguelike flourish grafted onto a more linear structure, and it does not always sit neatly. Boss encounters themselves lean on pattern recognition and timing, which rewards patience, though the feedback on hits and damage can feel murkier than you'd want. Where Narvas shows its heart most clearly is in local co-op. A second player drops in as a clone of Mace, and the couch chaos of two people managing the same cramped screen space is genuinely fun in short bursts. It amplifies everything, the good momentum and the control jank alike, but as a low-stakes evening with a friend it holds up. The pixel art does its job without overpromising: environments are colourful enough to distinguish one planet from the next, animations read clearly mid-combat, and the retro atmosphere lands that nostalgic early-2000s feel that some players specifically called out as a highlight. Time-attack leaderboards give completionists a reason to replay individual missions, which suits the game's arcade identity more than a long-haul campaign structure would. Narvas is the kind of game that clearly comes from a place of genuine enthusiasm for old-school side-scrollers. It has ideas worth rooting for. But the control feel, which is the single most load-bearing thing in a momentum-based platformer, has not caught up with the ambition yet. If you have someone to share a couch and a controller with, and a tolerance for friction that comes from craft rather than carelessness, there is something worth discovering here. Solo players who prize tight input response will hit the wall-jump detection and bounce off fast.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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