Neva

In a lot of ways, I knew exactly what to expect from Neva – the beautiful art direction, the sweeping musical score, and the emotional story that will have you all up in your feelings. Those have become the hallmarks of developer Nomada Studio, which burst onto the gaming scene with 2019’s GRIS, a title that sits firmly in my personal top 10 favorite games ever. Five years later, Nomada has produced another great piece of art in Neva that attempts to evolve the studio’s formula to varying degrees of success.

You play as Alba, a young woman with an even younger white wolf cub named Neva at her side. Together, the pair are trying to restore a dying world by fighting strange, ink-ish creatures that are consuming both flora and fauna alike. The game takes place in a surreal, dream-like world across four seasons, beginning with Summer. It is perfectly paced, only taking as long as it needs to tell its emotional tale, which is about six hours. Each season also adds a new gameplay wrinkle, either mechanically with combat, an enemy variant, or sometimes just a new environmental puzzle to navigate. It does a good job of keeping things fresh, and each time I began to think I had seen everything the game had to throw at me was almost the exact time that something new was introduced.

Before I get into the gameplay elements, I can’t go any further without first discussing how gorgeous Neva is. Put simply, it is a work of moving art – a watercolor painting in motion, if you will. Boasting a huge color palette and stunning hand-drawn animation work, Neva has been crafted by a team of artists with incredible vision and attention to detail. Although the game is brief, I implore you to stop and take a moment every now and then to admire its sheer visual beauty. This is one game that I wish I had an OLED television to play on, so do yourself a favor and play it on the biggest, boldest screen that you have access to.

Your eyes will not be alone in this feast for the senses, being joined happily by your ears. Music is the second part of a swift and emotionally decisive one-two gut punch in Neva, and another one of those Nomada Studio hallmarks. As with GRIS, the studio enlisted the musical genius of Berlinist for Neva’s original score, and quite frankly, I’m shocked that more developers and publishers have not discovered the Spanish composer. Neva’s music ties to its emotional story exquisitely. It’s poignant, melancholic, and at times, hopeful, with the occasional sweeping crescendo that punctuates particularly cathartic scenes. My wife popped into my game room during the end credits music and almost immediately began to cry. Someone must have been cutting onions in the room because, strangely, I had liquid leaking from my eyes too. Yeah, it’s that good, so in addition to playing on that OLED screen if you have it, put on a good pair of headphones as well.

Mechanically, Neva is 2D platformer with light combat elements. Light in the sense that you use one button to attack with Alba, another for Neva, and a button to dodge. There are no input combos or the like, with combat largely based on identifying enemy attack patterns and timing windows for you to strike within. The addition of combat is a massive departure from the developer’s first game, and while narratively it may make sense, I’m not convinced Neva needed it. Its combat does present a decent challenge in some sequences, requiring me to replay my fair share of set pieces, but thankfully the checkpoint system is mostly forgiving. There are two difficulty modes available – adventure and story. As you might imagine, story mode makes both combat and platforming challenges easier while removing death almost entirely. I played Neva in adventure mode, as it was the default experience, so I saw quite a few death screens. To be clear, Neva is not a backbreaking game, but there were times when I felt like I was playing one of those SEGA Genesis-era Disney platformers. All of which is to say that while combat does not detract from the experience of Neva, I don’t feel it necessarily brings anything to the table either.

Traversal in Neva also presents a challenge here and there, with tight platforming mechanics that evolve just enough to keep things fresh throughout the entire game. It also ties into the theme of each season’s weather in interesting ways, with a section during the Winter season that is particularly brilliant. As with the combat, there were a few sections that I had to try several times, but these felt fairer, and more palatable, than the combat challenges. With that said, platforming and combat are simply a means to an end in Neva, and what an end it is.

Neva is a beautiful game about love, the circle of life, family, and a surreal world trying to devour its inhabitants. As the father of a four-month-old, watching Neva as an infant wolf cub needing the help and protection of Alba resonated with me to my core. And I have a feeling that witnessing Neva’s maturity over the course of the game may resonate with me even more as my own cub continues to grow. Neva is an easy recommendation for fans of emotionally heavy narratives, and doubly so for those who value the art and music of the games they play. Mechanically, I’m not sold on the merit of its combat, but artistically, and as storytellers, developer Nomada Studio remains one of the best and brightest in the business with its sophomore outing.