Neva review – sublime portrait of a warrior and her wolf in a dying world

A warrior and her wolf are running through perspective-shifting collages of the most sumptuous nature scenes I’ve ever seen in a video game. Cranes flit from shining pools, boar and stags roam in the background; as the camera zooms out on the plain, yellow flowers extending off on all sides, a cleaved mountain comes into view in the distance. But there is a corrupting force at work. Here birds fall from the sky, black flowers blooming from their tiny bodies. Formless masked demons emerge from the ground to feast on them. These are your enemies, vanquished with a thin blade drawn from your warrior’s side. But there are so many of them – and you’re just one human, and a wolf.

Neva does not embellish this setup with words. You never find out what led to this corruption, or why you alone are fighting it. It tells its story with extraordinary visuals and elegant animation from developer Nomada Studio, in concert with chest-tighteningly effective music from Barcelona-based Berlinist. Many games that achieve this level of beauty suffer a little for prioritising style over substance, but Neva hits home on all levels. I was on the verge of tears at times, watching its formerly exquisite world succumb to corruption as the seasons passed, its beautiful creatures possessed by the awful blackness, birds frozen in motion, creating dreadful totems of the dead. By the end I was weeping as I clutched the controller.

Your white wolf starts out as a little pup who needs a helping hand to leap over gaps, stops to sniff at things, and whines piteously for a cuddle after every encounter with the demons. Black hands reach up from the earth to pollute and snatch at the cub, and you must protect it, beating back the darkness with everything you’ve got: a dash, a double-jump and that thin rapier. I will 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 realised that the creature was growing.

Before long, the wolf is showing you the way. Majestic antlers emerge from its head; it can savage the demons, work with you to slay them. Later, it is the one protecting you. You can still stop at any time to stroke and soothe the creature, but it grows in confidence with every passing season. The bond between you and this wolf is the emotional centre of the game, and though I often suspected how it might end, I was in no way prepared for what happened at the close of Neva’s three-hour runtime, or the extraordinary sights I saw along the way.

The nature collages are paired with Monument Valley-esque transforming architecture, giving you plenty of ways to exercise your elegantly limited set of skills. By the midpoint of this game you will know the precise range and limitations of that double-jump-dash combo, and as your wolf grows it adds its own talents to your repertoire. Every new season introduces an interesting new application for these skills, paired with a shift in tone. The puzzles are well thought-out, the combat challenging enough to feel consequential: when your warrior dies, like the birds, she is shudderingly overtaken by black flowers. Black things always mean death in this game, though it is sometimes hard to tell which black things are part of the foreground of the scenery, 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 cleaved mountain always looms in the distance, beckoning you towards it. You do eventually reach it, in the dead of winter, beaten down, 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 short hours. It will be some time before I feel ready to play it again, but until I do, I will be recommending it to anyone who’ll listen.