TO The warrior and her wolf navigate perspective-changing collages of the most sumptuous nature scenes I have ever seen in a video game. Cranes flutter from the sparkling ponds, wild boars and deer wander in the background; As the camera zooms in on the plain, with yellow flowers spreading everywhere, a cleft mountain appears in the distance. But there is a corrupting force at work. Here birds fall from the sky and black flowers sprout from their tiny bodies. Formless masked demons emerge from the ground to feast on them. These are your enemies, defeated with a fine sword drawn from your warrior’s side. But there are so many, and you are just one human and one wolf.
Neva does not embellish this montage with words. You never find out what led to this corruption or why you are alone in fighting it. It tells its story with extraordinary visuals and stylish animation from developer Nomada Studio, paired with tremendously effective music from Barcelona-based Berlinist. Many games that reach this level of beauty suffer a bit from prioritizing style over substance, but Neva hits the nail on the head on every level. At times I was close to tears, watching their once exquisite world succumb to corruption as the seasons passed, its beautiful creatures possessed by terrible darkness, the birds frozen in motion, creating gruesome totems of the dead. By the end I was crying as I grabbed the controller.
Your white wolf starts out as a puppy who needs help jumping over gaps, stops to sniff things, and whines piteously for a hug after each encounter with demons. Black hands rise from the earth to contaminate and catch the cub, and you must protect it, fending off the darkness with everything you have: a dash, a double jump, and that fine rapier. I confess that I found the sense of responsibility I felt for this wolf cub almost unbearable, so it was a relief when the season changed and I realized that the creature was growing.
Before long, the wolf shows you the way. Majestic antlers emerge from his head; It can attack demons, work with you to kill them. Afterwards, it is he who protects you. You can still stop at any time to pet and calm the creature, but its confidence grows with each passing season. The bond between you and this wolf is the emotional center of the game, and while I often suspected how it might end, I was in no way prepared for what happened at the end of Neva’s three-hour run, or the extraordinary sights I saw. along the way.
Nature collages combine with transformative Monument Valley-style architecture, giving you plenty of ways to exercise your elegantly limited skill set. Halfway through this game you’ll learn the precise range and limitations of that double-jump-run combo, and as your wolf grows, he’ll add his own talents to your repertoire. Each new season presents an interesting new application for these skills, along with a change in tone. The puzzles are well thought out and the combat is challenging enough to feel important: when your warrior dies, like birds, the black flowers reach for her shuddering. Black things always mean death in this game, although sometimes it’s hard to tell which black things are part of the foreground of the stage and which black things will hurt you when you touch them.
As in Journey, surely now an ordained saint of artistically ambitious and emotionally resonant video games, that cleft mountain always looms in the distance, beckoning you toward it. You finally reach it, in the middle of winter, defeated and the world dying around you. I’m still thinking about what happened there. Rarely has a game made me feel so much in a few hours. It will be some time before I feel ready to play it again, but until I do, I will recommend it to anyone who wants to listen to it.
