Neva already makes me want to protect its magic wolf baby with my life

In hindsight, I feel like I wronged Neva – the upcoming action-platformer from Gris devs Nomada Studio – by allowing my first thoughts on its reveal trailer to be "I bet the dog dies at the end." A new, obviously gorgeous adventure with serious platforming pedigree and that’s your response? Grow up, me.

Besides, the dog actually dies at the beginning. A dog, anyway: Neva’s preview demo, based on its opening hour, begins with stoic swordswoman Alba and a friendly giant wolf overcome by a corrupting, oily-black scourge. Neva is the wolf’s cub, promptly adopted by Alba before the two set out into an uncertain (if beautifully watercoloured) world.

The idea is that Neva (the wolf) will grow in size, strength, and wisdom as Neva (the game) progresses. I didn’t see any of this growing-up in the demo, meaning I would strictly deal with Puppy Neva – and like all puppies, this one is as adorable as she is meatheaded. Neva will drop to drink from ponds. Neva will chase butterflies. Neva will get sad when she misses a jump, them wriggle excitedly after she succeeds on the second go. The colourful, layered backdrops and cutesy beast partner may bring to mind Planet of Lana, but your little cat-monkey buddy in that game always knew how to stay on task. Neva, by contrast, needs managing: with a button tap, Alba will break her usual silence to call Neva’s name, encouraging her in the desired direction.

This gives the early stages the mild flavour of an escort mission, but really it’s more a series of soft puzzles, based around coaxing Neva where she needs to go. There’s none of the frustrations that usually come as a package deal with escorting: no instant failure when Neva gets into trouble, nor a second life gauge to worry about. And instead of AI failures, Neva is dumb because her brain is still the size of a walnut. As such, she’s dumb in largely endearing ways, like with the aforementioned butterfly-chasing, or when she stops to try eating a dangling flower that anyone other than an infant wolf can see is slightly too high to reach.

I like her, in case you can’t tell. In fact, it only took about half an hour of demoing to have me develop a positively John Wickian sense of canine protectiveness, muttering threats at the wiggly petroleum people who’d dare try to lay a creepy finger on her. Then killing them. Be seeing you, you inky bellends. My concern for my wolfy ward was cannily reflected in Alba, too – the further Neva strays, the more urgent and more worried the calls would become.

Less enthusing is the combat itself. Tonally, it’s not necessarily out of place – Alba is immediately under greater physical threat than Gris ever was – but it somehow seems both overly simplistic and incongruously challenging. Offensively, you’ve just got a teensy sword with a basic combo swing, and the meatiness of enemies, combined with a lack of forceful animation on hits, can make it feel like you’re just swinging a toothpick at Dave Bautista. But then there’s also an emphasis on I-frame dodge-rolling straight out of Elden Ring, culminating in a boss fight that may as well be accompanied by Gregorian chanting.

The good news here is that as Neva grows, she’ll eventually join you in battle, so hopefully an extra pair of fangs will make these combat moments more dynamic and satisfying. In the demo, they don’t quite go as far as to spoil the vibe, but they’re definitely the lowlights. A chase scene, in which fighting back isn’t an option, did a far better job of ratcheting up the tension than any of the sword-swinging bits did, despite "run away from big thing" being a standard platformer trope in itself.

The art helps; Nomada evidently have just as keen an eye for the eerie as they do for the magnificent. Visually, there some intentionally low-FPS animations that hark back to Gris, but whereas that game’s style was orderly and even diagram-like in places, Neva has a softer, lineless look, befitting its more natural locales. Not to mention some pitch-perfect musical scoring, filling in perfectly for the script’s lack of actual words.

Now, as I form an impression that will absolutely not be based around the mortality of dogs, I’m far more interested by what Neva does well – the platforming, the presentation, my precious wolf child – then I am fretful about how much fighting there is. If the full game is anything like the demo, there’ll be a story mode anyway, easing the difficulty and making Alba immortal. That’ll be the way to go, I suspect.