GRIS made waves in 2018 for its beautiful, painting-like visible model and story, and when it got here to PS4 a 12 months later, we thought it was nice. Now Nomada Studio is again with Neva, a sport that builds upon the sturdy components of GRIS and vastly improves the opposite areas to create a beautiful, emotional, and fascinating story of loss, love, and life.
Alba is a younger girl certain to a curious, spritely wolf cub named Neva following an encounter with mysterious darkish forces corrupting the land. Embarking on a journey throughout all 4 seasons, you platform your method between cliffs, landscapes, and buildings to struggle off the darkness and survive to the subsequent season.
Neva holds nothing again within the artwork, animation, and sound division. The expertise is filled with glorious makes use of of color and shadows, every scene brimming with life within the backgrounds, character actions, and even small prospers like Neva howling or Alba sitting right down to relaxation. The soundtrack and pacing are additionally completely aligned with the story being informed. They intensify the emotional story moments, significantly within the second half, and reinforce the struggle for survival through the fight and platforming.
These extra concerned moments are surprisingly sturdy for a narrative-focused journey, and an enormous enchancment upon GRIS. Effectively-designed, pleasing fight, puzzles, and platforming are continuously throwing new concepts at you as you attempt to destroy the darkish, amorphous creatures plaguing the land. The sport even has boss fights which are memorable, difficult, and visually spectacular.
There’s an entire 10-15 minute gameplay part within the Winter season of the five-or-so-hour journey with probably the most spectacular and interesting platforming mechanics we have ever seen in a 2D sport. It is transient however extremely memorable, and visually beautiful in the way in which it presents its platforming challenges to you.
These gameplay moments and the components the place each facet of the expertise comes collectively to work in concord aren’t fairly frequent sufficient. We want some mechanics caught round for longer, but it surely does preserve the expertise recent and persistently thrilling, making Neva one other hit from the small Barcelona-based studio.
