I don’t think you can more easily sell me on a game than by saying it was made by one of the artists behind Celeste, and has music from Disasterpeace, i.e. the composer behind Fez, Hyper Light Drifter, and It Follows. But that’s exactly what Neverway is, a horror RPG in the vein of Stardew Valley first announced back in April, back with a nice little look-in at yesterday’s Day of the Devs presentation.
Pedro Medeiros, the Celeste artist in question, and programmer/ writer Isadora Sophia gave a great little rundown of Neverway, explaining that you play as Fiona, a character who much like the player character in Stardew has just quit her dead end job. She’s trying to start over on a farm, live the quiet life, except she ends up having to serve as a herald for a dead god because of some debt she owes. Awkward!
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That kind of life does end up leading towards the need to fight in a classic Zelda-ish 2D action combat kind of way, but you do have to balance all of that adventuring with your regular life too. That means farming, paying your mortgage, making friends, maybe even falling in love. Those bonds can lead to new combat abilities too, something I wish my own relationships offered me.
Time works a bit differently in Neverway too, as rather than the day slowly tick tocking away, it moves from morning, to afternoon, to night when you do things like eat, sleep, or read a manual of some sort.
After a while, you’ll end up searching for the titular Neverway, a “decaying nightmarish reality that is slowly leaking into yours.” This is where you’ll learn about the game’s post-apocalyptic world as you pay off your debt.
I know “farming sim but dark” isn’t exactly a new concept, it’s just that Neverway is doing so with such eyecatching style I can’t help but be won over by it. It looks like there’s a real sincerity to the life-sim elements as opposed to them just being slapped into some dark themes. That’s the ticket to my heart honestly, a good bit of earnestness goes a long way.
Neverway doesn’t have a release date just yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam.