Potentially a fresh and hardcore roguelite metroidvania, coming soon | Demo Review - Never Grave

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✨Overview

Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is an upcoming roguelite metroidvania with town building, 4-player coop, and ‘possession’ mechanics to freshen up the genre. The game is set to release in Early Access in Q1 2024, but players can already get a taste of the experience through the already available demo on Steam, and I tried just that. The game supports up to 4-player coop, but in the demo, only singleplayer was possible to try. ⭐️Score: 7/10

📖Story and Premise

There's not really a clear narrative in this one, and the game — at least the Demo — basically jumps straight into gameplay action the moment you start it. We do know that it’s a tale of revenge by our Witch protagonist against the ones who ruined the whole kingdom, including our town. The church below the town has survived, becoming our staging ground for our revenge-filled dungeon crawling. 🎨Visuals and Art Never Grave features hand-drawn animation and strong vibrant color palette that might remind you of games like Hollow Knight. There game is in some ways morbid with all the corpse reanimation and characters melting into a red liquid but you don’t really notice it amidst all the nice charming art design and melodramatic soundtrack this game has. The world feels like a living coloring book, with vibrant colors and artful detail. The main character is charmingly cute, and the character designs feature a chibi-like aesthetic. 🎮Gameplay

The gameplay offers a mix of hack-and-slash combat and possession mechanics, while offering town building elements during moments of respite on your home town. As a metroidvania, 2D platforming elements are a huge part of dungeon crawling — there are secrets to discover, traps to avoid, and hazardous environments to navigate around in. Death is an integral part of the experience. The core experience involves repeatedly exploring dungeons, gradually reaching deeper than before, and simultaneously building up your character’s power and the town’s facilities. The dungeons are touted as being procedurally generated, and they are, but I’m not sure to what extent, I’ve noticed recurring bits and segments of levels (similar or exactly the same) returning to my levels over and over again. As a roguelite game, the character starts off relatively weak, but then acquire abilities, grimoires, and blessings during runs that temporarily increases you characters power. You get to choose from a list of three throughout the runs. From simple attack and defense buffs, to additional effects such as fire damage upon crit or explosions upon enemy death. As for the persistent progression, do you get to upgrade your character permanently by spending resources and gold or perhaps build your town’s facilities for better bonuses and rewards. This is a gradual process — every failed run you reset back to town, but bring something back useful every time. It seems like chopping down trees and mining stones as a mechanic isn’t going anywhere, as even Never Grave also features town-building and resource gathering mechanics. Since the town was fully destroyed, it’s part of your task to rebuild it, and constructing new facilities will grant bonuses to the player. These bonuses include the ability to craft new materials, acquire new skills, unlock new abilities, and, in turn, access more facilities to build. One more unique element in the gameplay is that with the cursed hat, players can take control of a selected range of enemies encountered in the dungeons. Each possessed enemy grants the player specific abilities, enabling them to open up new avenues of action and temporarily gain advantages in battles – while preserving the main character health points. ⚔️Combat

Combat is both challenging and rewarding. It plays similarly to hardcore-style 2D roguelite games like Dead Cells — slash, dodge, jump, and use abilities in order to defeat a wide range of enemies with their own unique mannerisms and attack patterns. Taking control of an enemy by possessing it also grants you the moveset of that enemy. The demo featured lacked enemy variety, but judging from the gameplay trailer, we are about to get a lot more. The game is a bit unforgiving with the hitboxes work in my tastes. The character easily takes damage at the slightest touch of enemies. Offensively, the game is a fun hack and slash mechanically, dodging feels responsive and intuitive, and I love how there is a slight visual and audial indicator when enemies are about to attack, but i do feel that the game focuses too much on horizontal attacks, leaving not much option to attack even diagonally especially with flying and elevated mobs. I also found the game very unforgiving with health points, especially during early runs. You don’t have a set amount of lives you can use per run, and health potions are used sparingly. Just one death and you restart all the way back to the village. You do pick up perks called grimoires across the runs that might contain a free revive or two, but they’re not always guaranteed. Overall, despite the hardcore nature and some challenges with the mechanics — the demo’s fun hack-and-slash mechanics, coupled with the possession system kept the demo engaging and I was compelled to play the first dungeon over and over again.

📊Technical Performance The game highly recommends playing with a controller, but when I plugged in mine, it didn't show any on-screen prompts for controllers and continued to display the keyboard bindings, which was a little confusing. Besides that, the demo ran without any issues for me, and I was able to play smoothly. ⚖️Conclusion

While the demo may have showcased the game mechanics in action, it seemed to provide only a very tiny glimpse of what's to come in the game when I compared it with what the trailers have shown. In fact, it's the trailer that actually got me excited about Never Grave, which is set to offer a fresh experience in the roguelite metroidvania genre, with unique elements such as town-building and enemy possession mechanic. Will it deliver? We will find out soon enough. If you are interested in checking out the game, don’t just play the demo; check out the trailer too.

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