NEVERSONG Review for Steam

Neversong is an indie adventure game and an action RPG released onto the Steam platform on May 20th of this year. The game was developed by Atmos Games and Serenity Forge in cooperation, and published by Serenity Forge. The game follows a boy named Peet, who embarks on an adventure to overcome his trauma-induced coma and find out what happened to his close friend. Neversong has been receiving positive reviews on various platforms and is being thoroughly praised in the gaming community because of its interesting storyline and pleasing art style. On Steam, Neversong is accurately described as a “hand-drawn action adventure through a dreamy world filled with fleshy monsters, insane grown-ups, and sad children looking for their mommies.”

The design for Neversong is a beautiful blend of gothic classic (60s to be exact) and modern city style. The world is thematically dark in its visuals, including things such as tombstones, crosses, and, of course, monsters and having black, gray, browns and orange be the dominant colors. This is fitting because there is a horror element to the game, though it makes sure to come across as more creepy than frightening. The cool story-telling feature at the beginning of the game sets up a dark tone, but the tone of the game is unexpectedly upbeat and fun when you play it. The dialogue is kept more on the natural side and slightly comical, and was especially likable because of the delivery by the voice actors. The characters are exaggerated, but in a good way. They are true to their ages and memorable because of various details in their designs that keep them recognizable. I found myself excited to meet new characters and even more excited to find out more about the main mystery of the game.

Besides the fact that the characters are just adorable and the game is really aesthetically pleasing, I was genuinely interested to know what was going on and had fun exploring the possibilities. For a general overview, players play as Peet, a fairly feeble young orphan who struggles to make friends until he meets a girl named Wren. He and Wren build both a friendship and a romantic relationship (as romantic as children can be anyways) until they decide to explore an asylum, a decision that ends with Wren going missing and Peet going into a coma. From here, the story gets a little tricky. When Peet awakens, he finds that not only is Wren still missing, but so are all the adults in the town, leaving the kids to take over or search for them. He commences his search for his friend while gradually gaining information about the world he has just woken up in, and things are very strange. The themes of the story include youth, friendship, adulthood/loss of innocence, guilt, mental health, and more. Some things are lest unclear or up to interpretation by the end of the game but, all in all, the game gets its point across just fine.

It’s worth mentioning that, for me, it was pretty much impossible to play without a controller, which is fine because the game highly recommends that you use one from the get-go (which somehow I missed at first). Most of the games play involves jumping, grappling, dodging, and swinging your bat, all at the right time. There is a puzzle solving and strategy element to getting through areas, but they’re pretty simple to figure out; it’s the execution that brings in the challenge, considering that difficulty settings cannot be changed. You do have a certain number of lives in the game, which will increase (along with your skill set) as you progress and get to the more challenging enemies. There are fireplaces for saving progress, and resetting an area can be as simple as walking out and in again, so don’t worry too much about the unchangeable difficulty setting, though I did wish that I could change the sensitivity settings. Anyhow, Neversong was fun to play and explore, and the story was delightfully heart-wrenching.

9/10

Check Out the Neversong Trailer:

Neversong is available for consoles and PC via Steam. 

For more information, please visit: https://serenityforge.com/games/onceuponacoma/

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