Palworld's next game has Hollow Knight Vibes (Never Grave Review)
121You can download the demo right here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2395770/Never_Grave_The_Witch_and_The_Curse/
----
Pocketpair are riding the hype wave of their smash hit Palworld directly into the face of its new game Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse which they quietly released a demo for the other day onto Steam. With this release they're already greasing up their buttholes for a fresh round of comparisons this time with Indy darling Hollow Knight. Which is good because that last Pokemon conversation officially entered dead horse beating territory when PETA offered a guide on how to play Palworld in a vegan way. Could someone go tell PETA they're beating dead horses? I think they'd appreciate the joke.
Officially Never Grave is getting worked on by an internal team called Frontside 180 spun up for this project specifically. So pocket pair is just being listed as the publisher. One look at the trailer and you see that any hollow knight inspirations are tangible enough for me to squeeze a fairly honest clickbait thumbnail out of it but mechanically skin deep. I finally watched that Silksong trailer, holy god damn. That’s my review of that.
Anyway, you play as a hat that can reanimate things, Not to be confused with that pervert hat from super mario odyssey. You can jump off your Bravely Default Reject witch girl at the top of a jump to get extra height, and then poop her out the bottom of the hat again at will. So no need to worry about complicated puzzle shenanigans. Critters can also be possessed and wielded. according to the trailer showing the unincluded multiplayer mode monster possession is how most of your buddies are going to support you during a dive.
The gameloop follows the roguelite city builder system of delving a random dungeon and then coming back at death to upgrade the town and your abilities. During your run you can pick from temporary buffs to augment your build or resurrections to elongate your chances. Occasionally branching accesses to lower levels will boost enemies and drop rates for better risk and reward. There are two main hubs. The first is a church full of portals to different rooms of horror just like in real life (Just like the ones I tell my therapist about). The other leads to your little hand placed town made using blueprints you slowly acquire. You can place little walls and windows and stuff but I just piled everything uncomfortably close to the door for maximum inefficiency so I could keep clicking on the wrong thing.
You can grow crops which require watering and time, so you have some lovely little chores to do between dives. You need the resources from farming to pay off later upgrades in your skill tree and cooked meals at town can give you a buff for the next run.
While I enjoy titles where my characters growth is represented in-game by something tangible I'm not personally a fan of getting threatened with agriculture. As a rat I'm a proud scavenger.
The animations are cute and the gathering is serviceable enough. I'm interested to see how they handle multiplayer. The only real fault I can find with the game at the moment is some weird audio stuttering
THe demo is long enough to get feel for the game loop but data won't carry over to the main game when it releases within the next few months. So do as my dad did when he looked down at newborn me, don't get attached to it at all.
If this isn't the game for you, just wait for their next title game next week which will be probably be Modern Warfare 3 but with farming.