HomeFeaturesNeva
Dogsitting has never looked this good
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Devolver Digital
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Devolver Digital
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Devolver Digital
This gives the early stages the mild flavour of an escort mission, but really it’s more a series of soft puzzles, based around coaxing Neva where she needs to go. There’s none of the frustrations that usually come as a package deal with escorting: no instant failure when Neva gets into trouble, nor a second life gauge to worry about. And instead of AI failures, Neva is dumb because her brain is still the size of a walnut. As such, she’s dumb in largely endearing ways, like with the aforementioned butterfly-chasing, or when she stops to try eating a dangling flower that anyone other than an infant wolf can see is slightly too high to reach.
I like her, in case you can’t tell. In fact, it only took about half an hour of demoing to have me develop a positively John Wickian sense of canine protectiveness, muttering threats at the wiggly petroleum people who’d dare try to lay a creepy finger on her. Then killing them.Be seeing you, you inky bellends. My concern for my wolfy ward was cannily reflected in Alba, too – the further Neva strays, the more urgent and more worried the calls would become.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Devolver Digital
The good news here is that as Neva grows, she’ll eventually join you in battle, so hopefully an extra pair of fangs will make these combat moments more dynamic and satisfying. In the demo, they don’t quite go as far as to spoil the vibe, but they’re definitely the lowlights. A chase scene, in which fighting back isn’t an option, did a far better job of ratcheting up the tension than any of the sword-swinging bits did, despite “run away from big thing” being a standard platformer trope in itself.
The art helps; Nomada evidently have just as keen an eye for the eerie as they do for the magnificent. Visually, there some intentionally low-FPS animations that hark back to Gris, but whereas that game’s style was orderly and even diagram-like in places, Neva has a softer, lineless look, befitting its more natural locales. Not to mention some pitch-perfect musical scoring, filling in perfectly for the script’s lack of actual words.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Devolver Digital
