I recently reviewed the Danish student game “Nevermore”, one of a series of games, to come out of DADIU (”The Danish Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment”).
You can find my review (in Danish) on the dr.dk game blog, or read my (poorly) translated version below.
Try out Nevermore and the other free student games.
Nevermore review
Meet Anna & Mr. Huggles - Main protagonists of 'Nevermore'
Have you ever tried getting picked on? Anna sure has. She’s a poor, defenseless girl, with only her teddy bear “Mr. Huggles” to comfort her, when the big boys are teasing. Luckily Mr. Huggles has a plan, which is sure to put an end to the bullying. A plan involving a large, sharp knife. You can probably figure out what happens next. Anna & Mr. Huggles depart on a playground massacre of epic proportions, and live out any victims dream: Bloody revenge on the tormentors.
Conceptually Nevermore belongs to the school where the bizarre and blood-dripping meets the ultra-cute. The unconformed gets revenge on the establishment by discarding any kind of morals and butchering away. Lovely! While there isn’t much to hold against Nevermore’s concept and graphical style, the gameplay mechanics leaves quite a bit to be desired.
Anna is fairly responsive and easy to control. The big bullies are thrown through the air, with a couple of swift knife-cuts, trailing behind them a long spray of blood. The primary purpose of the game, is collecting this blood splatter, by raising the teddy bear over Anna’s head(!) Unfortunately this central feature is also the game’s biggest source of annoyance. The blood falls quickly to the ground, and you must attempt to correctly time your run towards it. Sadly, it isn’t really possible to get more than a small fraction collected, since your movement speed isn’t matched to the speed of the falling blood splatter. This means you never really feel that you’re doing it “right”. Unless you “cheat” and knock the enemies up against a wall, you will always miss the majority.
Likewise, there seems to be a lack of interaction with the enemies in the game. The big, blunt bullies march randomly around the schoolyard in a zombie-like daze, and don’t seem to notice their friends getting slaughtered around them. Sure, they will start chasing you once you get close enough, but it might have been a thrill to be able to chase THEM once in a while. Vengeance is sweetest when your enemies are driven before you, not quite as sugary when they don’t seem to care about getting stabbed to death.
Nevermore appears as a game where style has been the primary focus, while the game mechanics feels secondary. The game has something going for it, but the developers should have thought more about how the game’s primary “bread & butter” functions work. What is the player actually DOING, and how is this made fun and worthwhile to the player? Anna & Mr. Huggles is a charming couple with big potential, and I wish them the best in the future. The knife needs a bit of sharpening before it cuts to the bone.
Reviewed by Thomas Løfgren, Level Design Lead – IO Interactive.
Tags: DADIU, gameplay, indie games, Nevermore