I feel like a heartless asshole but this game left me cold. Besides the lovely visuals, it felt generic, predictable and not very compelling. Let's try to unpack why.

First, I wasn't grabbed by the intro cinematic. It starts and see a girl and her wolf attacked by a horde of black goo. The wolf dies and the girl cries and I barely feel anything. I don't know who these people are, why should I care about them? The only reason seems to be because they are white and their enemy is a generic black goo that feels like a placeholder that the developer forgot to change.

Then starts the gameplay. Very little of it, really. I spent most of the first 15 minutes holding right without doing much else. Eventually we get combat, which is also pretty generic and barely evolves at all. The problem not only is that combat doesn't feel good, but that it's too easy. The enemies never feel like an actual threat and besides the black goo trope, they don't really look or act like bad guys that I should be killing (the fact that normal plants and flowers are also black doesn't help). They feel like just plants or animals that are doing their thing. This prevents any sort of catarsis from going through the game.

As the game progresses, the pet wolf Neva gains abilities and becomes a powerful force in combat. You start to rely on her attacks to deal with enemies. So when you are separated, you feel it that much more... except that since combat is pretty easy, losing Neva didn't change combat that much.

And then there's the story. It's extremely predictable; you can see most of what's going to happen from leagues away. It's also at odds with the gameplay. In the story and cutscenes, the girl is supposed to be struggling with the black goo, but in gameplay enemies are mostly ineffective as I'm ploughing through them.

The ending is also confusing. Since chapters are named by the seasons of the year and the goo acts as a force of nature more than an evil agent, by the late game it seemed clear to me that this was all a cycle. We are essentially playing as a Persephone type, whose journey marks the passing of the seasons. So I wasn't at all surprised when the ending started with a reprise of the intro cinematic. "That´s clever", I though, "this whole journey now recontextualises the beginning of the game and changes how we feel about it; we are going to see the death of the wolf again, but this time the sadness will be mixed with a sense of inevitability; its death giving birth to a new year." But then.... the old wolf and the new wolf defeat the black goo and the game shows this as a triumph? But wait, then there's no more cycle? Are they living in a perpetual Spring? That's not good! What's going on?

Maybe I just misunderstood the whole game. Maybe I'm a jaded bastard with no feelings, but Neva didn't click with me.

I’ll start by saying - I loved Gris. It came at a time in my life when my mother was having serious health issues, and story touched me on such a deep level and legitimately helped me in the grieving process. Not to mention - the gameplay, level design, art, animation - everything was killer.

So with Neva, I had very high hopes. I couldn’t imagine what the sophomore effort from this studio could achieve with Gris as their starting place. And what I got was … an uninspired snoozefest with basically zero originality.

Right from the start, it felt off. The opening cinematics were rushed, the pacing just kinda flew by, I had absolutely zero attachment to the characters, the backstory or to the world by the time act 1 really began. So i trudged on, knowing that I was missing something and was supposed to be caring about these characters that I felt nothing for.

The gameplay - it’s absolutely in the shadows of Gris. The weak attempt at combat is nothing new. The level design is completely linear with really basic platforming. And the enemy designs are so bland, again, nothing I haven’t seen a million times before. The abilities you gain in Gris were so cool, original, absolutely a joy to discover. Here they are painted by numbers.

The imagery is just so bleh. Everything is just so dang generic and has zero charm or originality to me. The story and the gameplay, the level design and the imagery… nothing adds up. I don’t know how the developers of Gris took a rocket ship backwards; but that’s what it feels like. Super disappointed.

Neva is undeniably gorgeous, dripping with iconic Nomada style. The game opens strong and does a fantastic job of getting you invested in the relationship between Neva and Alba. The soundtrack is of the quality you'd expect from Berlinist, but generally more subtle and less moving than Gris', with a few notable exceptions.

The gameplay is similar to Gris in many regards, with the addition of some extremely basic hack-n-slash combat which feels like a response to critics of Gris' gameplay. It's... Fine. The swordplay is serviceable, but not especially weighty or satisfying. The special attack does deepen the combat ever so slightly, but ultimately the combat detracts from the Nomada experience more than it enhances. Rather than being fully engrossed in the audiovisual experience, you need to stay vigilant for ambushes and combat encounters which can break your momentum and break your immersion through video-gamey frustration. A "story mode" option exists, which makes you unkillable and slightly eases combat encounters. If I ever revisit Neva, that's likely what I'll be using.

The watercolor aesthetic of Neva is at times quite similar to Gris, but also much darker and even a bit grotesque, in a Studio Ghibli sort of way. I appreciated that, while the game clearly shared a lot of Gris DNA, Nomada gave Neva its own distinctive flair.

Gris was a phenomenal debut outing, and left Nomada with a very tough act to follow. They didn't quite capture that lightning a second time, but there's no shame in that. I respect their ambitions, even if I don't always like the changes, and the end result is a fantastic game that's well worth the price of admission.

I loved GRIS, so obviously I was excited for a new project from Nomada, and also wary about attempting to follow up such a unique game. And the problem is I don't think Neva is a bad game, I just like GRIS more in basically every way.

GRIS's soundtrack is hauntingly beautiful and grabs you from the first note, while Neva's (also by Berlinist) is fine but didn't really stick out for me, the compositions feeling more conventionally cinematic (compare, for example, "Gris, Pt. 1" with "where courage abide"). Neva's visual style is a little rougher around the edges (literally), more impressionistic, and don't get me wrong, Monet is one of my favorite painters, but there's something about GRIS's more solid style that I really like, and it also feels more alien and strange right off the bat than the forests you start in in Neva (which does admittedly have some cool set pieces later on). GRIS's gameplay is just engaging enough to propel you through the game without getting in your way; Neva feels like it's trying to do a little too much, and the combat in particular can get tedious (which is saying a lot for a game that only lasts 6 hours). Probably where they're most evenly matched, for me, is the story; I think both GRIS's abstract narrative and Neva's slightly more grounded narrative have pros and cons, and while I think Neva having more identifiable "plot" leaves it open to more critique I'm unwilling to take the position that that makes it worse, especially since it did make me Feel Feelings.

And while it's partially on me that I was comparing Neva to GRIS the whole time I was playing it, Nomada definitely invite that comparison given the similarities between the two games. Similar character design, similar presentation, some similar set pieces and narrative elements, not to mention they really love animating a billowy cloak as a characters falls a vast distance. And I'd completely forgotten that GRIS also has a "playing with my reflection" section.

All that being said, I didn't not enjoy the game, and since a lot of my disappointment comes down to personal preference I think there's a decent chance other people will really like it, especially if they don't already love GRIS and so aren't bringing that baggage to it. And it's the closest to a Princess Mononoke video game we're ever gonna get, so that's cool.

p.s. This should go without saying given the Mononoke comparison, but if you don't want to watch animals die, this one's not for you.

p.p.s. I did get all the collectibles and that did probably negatively affect my experience somewhat because I was very paranoid about missing one and having to replay a section. But after I found the second one I felt very clever so then I had to get the rest.

p.p.p.s. The big problem with combat, other than the sort of awkward, stiff feeling of it, is that it's not terribly difficult to avoid enemy attacks but nearly impossible to avoid contact damage while you're trying to attack them, especially on larger enemies, and the huge field of view doesn't help. Honestly, while there is some tactical satisfaction to be found in a few of the later battles, I think they either should have spent more time refining the combat or just not included it all (admittedly that would make this a very different game given the main character has a sword).

p.p.p.p.s. I feel like I didn't make it clear enough that this is a very pretty game. It's a very pretty game.