Neva review: gorgeous 2D platformer still has room to grow

In Neva, Nomada Studio’s follow-up to Gris, the cycle of life and death starts spinning immediately. An opening battle against land-poisoning sludge monsters turns tragic when my white wolf companion is slain. From that loss, a new relationship is born as I team up with my fallen pal’s orphaned pup. What would be a downer of an opening quickly turns into something hopeful. Even in the darkest moments, we can find reasons to keep fighting. As Swedish director Ingmar Bergman once noted: “Lilies often grow out of carcasses’ arseholes.”

Neva tackles that grand idea in a minimalistic fashion that hits a ceiling. The colorful adventure stuns with gorgeous music and visuals that make its beautiful world feel like something that’s worth protecting. It’s just light on originality outside of that, with simple 2D platforming and combat that never fully capitalize on its evolutionary chapter structure. Like Gris, it’s an effective tone piece that’s more about meditating on a feeling than overcomplicating its statement on life, death, and the beauty on both ends of that spectrum.

A world worth saving

Neva tells the story of Alba, a young girl fighting to protect nature from decay at the hands of creepy black monsters. After her trust wolf is slain, she becomes a surrogate mother for her cub, Neva. The two form a bond and travel together for the next year, each chapter taking place during a season. With each season, Neva grows bigger, gains more confidence, and even picks up a few new tricks that aid Alba in her duty.

The story plays out like a fable, wordlessly told through animated cinematics that deepen Alba and Neva’s bond. There are clear shades of Hayao Miyazaki in its environmentalist themes. It largely plays like a small-scale video game adaptation of Princess Mononoke. There are white wolves, beasts with massive antlers, and critters corrupting a beautiful natural landscape. While there’s not much depth to its message, Nomada Studio drills down on the pure emotional beats of its story. Its deaths are gut-wrenching, but its moments of light are warm and hopeful. It’s an effective portrait of life’s highs and lows in one five-hour adventure.

What really sells that idea is Neva’s breathtaking sound and visuals. The soundtrack is full of sweeping orchestral pieces that feel bigger than those in the grandest big-budget games out there. They’re awe-inspiring compositions that sell the emotional turns of each scene and make every vista feel like a sublime sight.

The soundtrack has the visuals to match; each natural landscape is awe-inspiring. Even something as similar as a forest clearing feels holy, as streaks of light shine through rich green foliage. Any given frame looks like a painting, and that makes matters all the more dire when monsters begin mucking it up with their dark corruption. It’s as if someone spilled a bottle of ink on a masterpiece. This isn’t a case of pretty visuals for pretty’s sake; I truly believe in Alba’s desire to protect such a place from rot. There’s a spiritual connection to the natural world here, and the minimalistic storytelling allows that strong feeling to take center stage.

Slowly growing

Though Neva’s sights and sounds communicate, that same sense of wonder is missing from its comparatively run-of-the-mill gameplay. It’s very much cut from the same cloth as 2018’s Gris, with all the same strengths and weaknesses intact. That game stunned with its watercolor art, but delivered thin puzzle platforming that even felt a little behind the times back then. Neva doesn’t move the bar much further, though it does scratch at a creative idea or two.

The platforming itself is fairly standard, with Alba being able to jump, air dash, pound through weak rocks, and scale walls. There’s some light iteration in later chapters, including a section where she needs to dash through portals, but it often feels indistinguishable to something like last year’s Planet of Lana. Even reading my review of that game now, I feel like I’m largely making the exact same critiques here.

The main difference is that Neva features a light combat system, which lets me slash enemies with one button or slam down on them. It’s a similarly thin system that’s mostly used to fight the same few monsters over and over with little variation. It’s not terribly complex, but it does keep the platforming from ever getting monotonous on its own.

While it’s all a little thin, Neva does find the seed of a great idea in its titular wolf. In the first chapter, Neva is helpless. The cub is almost too scared to leap between platforms or make daredevil dives off high heights. I often need to stop and comfort my friend, petting them between enemy encounters. But with each passing season, they grow. They become braver as they fearlessly follow me through platforming gauntlets and even start chasing down enemies automatically to help me fight them. I can even toss my cub toward enemies eventually. The more we grow together, the more physically connected we are.

It’s an effective moment in an otherwise pretty, though understated, adventure. Not every game needs to innovate, but considering that Neva is specifically about evolution, I found myself waiting for it to switch gears up through its abrupt ending. Like my pup early in our journey, Nomada Studio still feels like it’s growing as a developer. I can see its potential to create beautiful, heartfelt stories in both this and Gris, but it’s yet to really take a leap and find its voice when it comes to interactivity. But if Neva has taught me anything, it’s that growth doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a slow process that happens naturally. An uncertain whimper from the edge of a cliff can become a brave leap; it just takes a little time and encouragement.

Neva was tested on PC and Steam Deck OLED.