Neva Review - The Quest For Balance
In a day and age where gaming continues to mature, where games are systemically more sophisticated than they’ve ever been, and the stories told in these interactive worlds get ever more immersive, it takes an immense effort from developers to thread the needle and execute in all facets. In 2018, Spanish game developer, Nomada Studio, in partnership with mega indie-publisher Devolver Digital launched Gris, a game hailed by the masses for its beauty, but critiqued for its simplicity and linearity. With its newest title, Neva, Nomada is looking to address the concerns of Gris, but also spin up another affecting story to ensnare the hearts of the masses. With a range of mechanical additions to give players some gameplay depth, Neva rises above the achievements of Gris, becoming a more balanced experience, albeit one that still outstays its welcome.
If your childhood involved watching Disney’s Bambi, the opening of Neva could bring up some childhood trauma for you with the game trading in many all-important emotions, from love and loss, to the need to protect, deep fear and the pride of seeing the next generation thrive and grow. For a teacher, and a parent of two kids 6 and under these themes resonated with me deeply, but something was wrong, and it wasn’t until I sat with approximately 3-4 hour experience stewing in my mind post-credits before I realised that the game packs too much gameplay bloat, dampening the impact of a wonderfully constructed, but never spoken, plot.
At it’s core, Neva is a 2D side-scrolling adventure title with some light platforming elements. For the most part, players are executing simple jump and dash manouvres to navigate from left to right (mostly) as the game’s narrative plays out. As the player moves through each of the four seasonal environments, Neva, the wolf pup that you first adopt, grows, and with its increasing maturity and strength, the player character also can do more themselves. Though combat elements are overly simplistic, the ability to utilise Neva as a projectile weapon and means of extended reach allow combat encounters to be differentiated somewhat as the game plays out. Standard left to right sword swinging is the modus operandi of Neva, but these additional layers ensure that the gameplay doesn’t grow too stale and repetitive. The game sprinkles in a small selection of collectible blossoms to find which become increasingly hard to reach as the player’s platforming skillset expands. Despite my best efforts to collect them all, some were hidden well enough that I overlooked the locations of them, prompting the need for a secondary playthrough (or chapter replay) to clean up the leftovers. While not especially challenging, these micro-puzzles serve as a welcome change of pace at times given that the game has a propensity to insert prolonged running or basic platforming sequences.
The problem lies in the fact that while Neva clocks in at approximately 3-4 hours of length, the game could still have been halved in length, and it would have still delivered the narrative punch that it sought to, without the bloat in-between sequences that blunted the game’s edge. Even the game’s most challenging platforming or combat sequences were simply too easy (said as someone who is enormously intimidated by genuinely challenging games such as Souls-likes), and felt like misguided attempts to extract more gaming time from the experience. In the case of Neva, Nomada simply got the balancing act wrong.
On the presentational level however, much like Gris, Nomada has executed phenomenally well. The balance of greens, pinks and purples splash against the seasonal backdrops of the environments you explore, the softness of the games soundtrack amplifying the largely pristine environments. In moments of conflict, the games score rises with it, never to bombastic levels, but nicely proportionate to the escalation of the conflict itself. It moments where your heart might be under emotional siege, the score goes to those sad places with you as well.
On paper, Neva ticks all of the boxes, but in execution, it just went for a bit too much play-time, lessening the impact of all other elements. Nomada has delivered a game with gorgeous presentational value, improvements in gameplay systems, and layered atop it, a plot that tugs right at the heart-strings, but by linger for an hour too long, the sharpness of these elements has been blunted. Balance will be the key for whatever comes next.
Neva was reviewed on PS5 with a code kindly provided by Devolver Digital