There’s no question that working on a follow-up to a game that was met with great critical success has to be a challenge, especially when it is a title like GRIS whose charm was largely driven by its stunning and creative visuals. Aside from it obviously being a risk to simply try to pull off the same trick twice, it appears one of the goals with Neva was to give the gameplay side of the coin a bit more definition. While there were puzzles in GRIS, more often than not your character felt like a vehicle for moving from one impressive scene to another. With Neva, while the story is still conveyed through its visuals, there’s an added element of a loving and nurturing relationship that adds dimension to the story, but arguably at a cost.

After an emotionally-charged opening sequence, you and your furry companion will begin a fight to simply survive on what seems to be a world that is dying. Overrun by a growing darkness that can manifest itself in a variety of forms, you’ll spend quite a lot of your journey simply on the run, but that’s broken up by some conflicts as well. Earlier on, this will be limited to your character’s various sword attacks and combos, needing to evade enemy strikes and then slash your way through them. As the game progresses though, your frightened cub companion will continue to grow more formidable, eventually opening the door to the two of you working together, leveraging its abilities as well.

Over the handful of hours it will take to complete this journey, though the game’s story is told pretty well exclusively with its visuals, there’s no question that one of its greatest strengths is the bond the characters share. When you’re apart, and especially when you can hear their cries in the distance, you definitely feel driven to save them. Then, once you’re reunited, being able to give them a pet or a hug just reinforces that connection further. The thing is, there is a cost to the addition of the game’s combat and this increased emotional component, and that’s the loss of some of the creative artistic flourishes that GRIS delivered so effortlessly. The more rounded and traditional gameplay experience simply isn’t as compatible with as wild of creativity unfortunately.

All that said, there’s still no question that Neva is generally a work of visual art, and while there’s an occasional visual hiccup as the Switch hardware tries to keep up with the action, it still performs commendably overall. I did find myself missing some of the unexpectedly inventive moments of its predecessor, but replacing that with emotionally compelling characters and some more involved action still feels like a pretty fair trade. Make no mistake, the combat is appreciated and implemented well, but it’s also obviously not breaking any new ground and is just good, but not great. Still, when you combine all of its elements together, Neva is still a wonderful journey to spend a handful of hours immersed in.