This game is absolutely stunning. The music and atmosphere paired with an absolutely stunning aesthetic makes this game a 5/5 for me. I would really recommend this atmospheric, visual masterpiece.

If you like: Child of Light, Gris.

I can only hope that I've missed something about this game, because it tries to appear hopeful while sending a far more bleak message than Gris did.

Spoilers ahead, but this game is basically about a time loop. The nameless protagonist fights against what seems to be Death itself with the help of an orphan wolf whose mother was murdered by Death at the start of the game. The wolf grows up as the seasons change and the fight progresses and eventually, after supposedly defeating Death, has a pup of her own. And then pretty much the exact same cutscene from the beginning of the game plays out and the wolf dies.

This isn't hopeful. This is horrifying. The protagonist spends all of her time battling what is ultimately an unstoppable force and losing her loved ones to it. It is impossible to give any of the wolves a long life or a peaceful end, and the protagonist learns nothing, shown by how she reacts to her wolf's death the exact same way she reacted to the death of her mother. She really shouldn't be surprised. She didn't even try to save her life by doing things differently. What's the point of a time loop if the person at the center of it never progresses?

This is a story that I really only see ending in suicide after the credits roll because this is no way to live. Gris was about learning how to live again in someone's absence and stay connected to them in a new way; Neva is about being trapped by the responsibility to end something that you simply cannot defeat and watching everything you love die because of that inability. Gris reflected the human experience while Neva ignores the leaps and bounds in medicine and other studies that we've made since the beginning of civilization itself. Humans learn, unlike the characters in Neva. A hastily-thrown in message about how life is beautiful does not justify their eternal sentence. The act of preserving life and its beauty is meaningless if nothing changes and we lose it all anyway. What a terrible feeling to be left with.

How can mirrors be so beautiful, and how many wolves will die...