Neva

I finished Neva in a single sitting and sat quietly for a few minutes after the credits rolled, which is not something I do often. Nomada Studio, the Barcelona team behind Gris, has built their second game around a premise that sounds dangerously sentimental on paper: a swordswoman named Alba and a wolf cub named Neva, navigating a world being slowly consumed by a black, writhing corruption. The studio leans into that sentimentality without apology, and the result lands for almost everyone who plays it. Mechanically, Neva is a 2D action-platformer spread across four seasonal chapters, each one mirroring Neva's growth from vulnerable pup to a formidable wolf with her own combat role. Alba's toolkit is lean: sword slash, downward strike, double-jump, air dash, and a dodge. She carries three hearts, and chaining hits on enemies slowly regenerates lost health, which quietly nudges you toward aggressive play rather than cautious retreating. Neva herself evolves alongside the seasons. Early on she needs protection; later she can be directed to bite enemies, stall bosses, attack switches mid-air, and in the Winter chapter she becomes a mount for traversal across frozen terrain. The relationship is the game's mechanical spine, not just its emotional one. Two difficulty modes, Story and Adventure, mean the experience is genuinely accessible: Story mode removes death penalties entirely, while Adventure gives you those three fragile hearts and some boss fights that will genuinely punish mistimed dodges. It is worth noting the game was clearly designed with a controller in mind. Keyboard mapping for Neva's commands gets unwieldy fast, so plug in a gamepad before you start. The visual craft here is extraordinary, and I say that as someone who has seen a lot of indie art direction praised beyond its merit. Every background layer is hand-drawn, the parallax depth in forest scenes is dense with hidden detail, and the color language is precise: saturated greens and warm golds collapsing into black ooze as the corruption spreads. The enemy design draws openly from Studio Ghibli, particularly Princess Mononoke and the masked phantoms of Spirited Away, but the game earns those references rather than coasting on them. Berlinist, the same trio who scored Gris, returns here with a soundtrack that opens on somber piano and builds toward operatic swells during boss encounters and chase sequences. It is the kind of score that does emotional heavy lifting the game would otherwise need dialogue to carry, since Alba and Neva communicate entirely through intonation, gesture, and the single repeated word of each other's names. The criticisms worth flagging are real. At roughly four to five hours, several clever mechanical ideas appear and vanish before they breathe. A perspective-shifting puzzle in the Winter chapter is genuinely inventive and gone almost before you register it. Some players will find the ending ambiguous in a way that feels unresolved rather than intentionally open. A handful of scattered collectible flowers exist for completionists, but otherwise replayability is thin. The minority view, represented fairly in critical coverage, is that the wolf companion eventually transitions from feeling alive to feeling like an ability slot, particularly once you gain direct command of her. That reading is not wrong, though I think the emotional scaffolding around those moments papers over the mechanical seam for most players. If you played Gris and wished it had more tension, Neva is the answer. If you have never played anything by Nomada Studio and you value craft, mood, and a game that respects your evening without demanding your week, this is the one to start with. Slow readers of tooltips and people who need mechanical depth over fifteen hours will want to look elsewhere. Everyone else: block out an afternoon, use a controller, and try not to flinch when the wolf yelps.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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