Neva review – artful puzzle-platforming action with the fullest of hearts

Forgive me reader, but I’m going to reference a tweet. The other day I saw someone I don’t know talking about films, and it said: “There is a loss in going from Cronenberg, who is obsessively steeped in Heidegger, McLuhan & Freud, to his legions of imitators, who are obsessively steeped in Cronenberg, giallo & The Shining.” They may or may not have been right (reading between the lines, they were probably talking about The Substance, which is a film I haven’t seen yet – and hear is very good! – but which is kind of beside the point anyway).

Neva reviewDeveloper: Nomada StudioPublisher: DevolverPlatform: Played on PC, Steam DeckAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch

But it’s an interesting thought at least: what counts as legitimate influence? Where’s the line between being inspired by something and just plain aping it? And what happens, over time, when all your inspirations solely come from your own contemporaries in the medium – their own style, their own decisions – rather than from your own original source, whatever that might be? And then what happens when you repeat that over years or even decades, creating a series of faintly varying facsimiles, each new thing referencing other things before it that, way back when, had original, organic influences we’ve long since forgotten?

Aside from reflecting on just how my social media feed got so pretentious, it also got me thinking about video games, which are if nothing else extraordinarily self-referential (in Roguelikes and Metroidvanias – never mind the Doom Clones of old or Soulslikes today – we even have genres named after games themselves). It’s probably a little bit unfair to bring it up right now, in the case of Neva, a game that is utterly, wildly beautiful, elegantly designed and, in one brief sequence in particular, bordering on just a little bit genius. There is also inspiration here from the real world, so let’s park that whole Cronenberg thing for a bit and come back to it.

For Neva that inspiration is parenthood, which admittedly has become a very common inspiration for video games, from 2018’s God of War and beyond. But more specifically, and more interestingly, it’s the cycle of parenthood as life moves on. The progression from cared-for child, to nurturing parent, and then an adult who must care for parents of their own in later life and, eventually, be cared for again themselves.