..and the best part is that at the moment, depending on the platform, this game is available for either free, or $5 and it is definitely worth either one of those prices.
This is one of those games that doesn't tell you a story at all, there is no long and drawn out legend for you to get caught up on and no long cinematics for you to suffer through if you are not into that sort of thing. I love JRPG's for example, but I get annoyed at how the story takes up so much damn time when in the end almost all stories are about an evil empire that wants to take over the world or universe and you and your crack team of well-dressed teenage looking heroes are charged with stopping it by having 2 to 3 thousand mini battles that end with a very large battle at the end.
Neva is the opposite of this in that they tell you literally nothing about who you are, where you are, why you are there, what is happening, and who the enemy is. You just have to figure that out, draw your own conclusions and then make your own story inside your head. This is obviously pretty difficult to pull off but that is what makes the storytelling so great with these sorts of games.
All you really know is that you are in a forest of some sort and there is a little like creature with you. A much larger dog like creature that appears to be the parent of the small dog joins you and a large battle that you have no control over happens and big doggo gets mortally wounded.
Who are these dark creatures? why are they here? why do they want to kill you? None of these things are answered with words and it is up to your imagination to fill in the blanks. It is obvious that they are going to be in your way as you progress and they are the creatures that you end up fighting in the 20% or so of this game that is fighting, but also, a lot of it is puzzle solving and platforming, none of which is terribly difficult aside from one or two sections where if you just take a step back and try it differently, you are going to figure it out.
I don't remember how many bosses there are in this game but none of them are particularly difficult. Yes, you will die a few times because they have "stages" of attacks that until you get to that point there is no reason that you could possibly be prepared for them but you figure it out. On the PS5 anyway the loading times were so fast that it was almost immediate and this is a really good thing because I don't actually mind dying a lot in a game as long as I am not forced to wait for the entire fucking game to load in its entirety every time I perish.
At any point in time if you start to feel as though a certain part is too difficult you have the option at any time to turn the difficulty down. As I have warned in the past, this makes that game significantly easier so unless you are well and truly stuck, I would stay away from using this if I were you. I will admit that one night I was quite drunk and didn't have the hand/eye coordination necessary to play yet still wanted to, so I turned it down and ended up finishing the entire game it was so easy. It is still a visual marvel though, even on the easy setting.
Your dog/deer/wolf creature is named "Neva" and a big part of the emotion that comes out of this game is the attachment that you have with her. It's extremely well done to make me feel this emotional about a character on a screen but the music paired with the tragedy of certain portions of the game are just so impactful again, with zero story actually being told with words.
When you reach the end of the game you will likely be a bit disappointed that it is over and you end up being left in such a way that it is kind of up to you to figure out what the story or the lesson is here. There are a lot of ways of interpreting it all. This was true with other games similar to it such as Journey and Inside and both of those games (as well as many others) have inspired very long YT videos as well as forum discussions about what the game was about for the person involved.
There aren't many games like this and this is probably because it is more difficult than with other more traditional games to make money off of it. I am their target audience though and I think a lot of other people are as well. The plot is so 'undetermined" that the Wiki doesn't even have a plot section and honestly, that's the way that it should be. It's classified as a puzzle-platformer, but there are also elements of combat in there as well. The combat to me, was one of the only weak points of this game and if you just accept that this is not Silksong and the combat is not going to be refined, I think you will still really enjoy this one. Combat is simple but at times unnecessarily tedious because well, they have to make it more difficult as you go along and when there are only 3 moves in total, there isn't much you can do with that.
This is one of those games that I don't really feel like it is a game so much as I think it is an interactive work of art. I loved playing it but just like all the other ones like it, it doesn't really have a ton of replay value. Once you've seen it all the way through the gameplay is repetitive enough that you won't subject yourself to that again. This is a good 4-5 hour adventure that basically anyone will be able to complete provided they have two hands. This comes down a maximum of $1 an hour and that's a pretty damn good value if you ask me.
all uncredited pictures are my own screenshots