Review: Neversong, Thomas Brush’s Coma Update, Never Gets Going

It has just enough bells and whistles to suck you into its world, but not enough to compel your immersion.

Neversong
Photo: Atmos Games

Thomas Brush’s Neversong, a reimagining of his Flash-based adventure game Coma from 2009, is more expansive and deliberate than its predecessor. Formerly titled Once Upon a Coma, the game boasts an art style that’s less limited and more pointedly minimalist—all the better to accentuate the features and grotesqueries of the characters that fill our young protagonist’s world. The cohesive storybook narration better tethers this dark, Gorey-like nightmare to the real-world trauma that it unsubtly mirrors. And yet, Neversong still feels underdeveloped. There are some great items, characters, and visual effects on display here, but few leave a lasting impression across the less-than-three-hour campaign.

Red Wind Village’s denizens suffer from various mental illnesses, but Neversong superficially grapples with those afflictions. In fact, it’s just Peet’s rotund frenemy, Simeon, who serves a particularly active role—or, rather, roll—in the game, as his body dysmorphia is front and center as players maneuver him through the Spiderian Sewers. At best, one character’s obsession with parkour and another’s violent streak can be said to only tangentially influence the overall gameplay. And the fact that one villager has OCD doesn’t excuse all the repetitious backtracking, nor the recycling of a particular puzzle type involving bombs.

Even the good ideas feel squandered. It’s a smart decision to make all of Peet’s upgrades be everyday items, like an umbrella that helps him rise over air currents, or a skateboard that allows him to leap over gaps. The whimsical mundanity not only sets Neversong’s otherwise conventional gameplay apart from other adventure games, it also successfully conjures the intended level of childhood nostalgia. But short of being used to collect a few optional cosmetic outfits, these tools rarely function as anything other than a means of temporarily gating player progress. Outside of the Booty Bum Marsh, that Slugboard has no purpose, and the Bootybrella is useful only if you mistime a jump and need to glide. It’s disappointing to see hard-won goods like a creepy See n’ Say toy used for only a single puzzle.

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Considering that Neversong’s last act takes place inside the Blackfork Asylum, it’s more than a little ironic that the game significantly suffers from a lack of commitment. Both at the beginning and end of the campaign, Peet is plagued by distortion effects that skew his sense of reality. Knife-wielding maniacs creepily and subtly start to appear in the windows of a repeating corridor; later, space itself warps and swirls as if Peet is stuck in some sort of time eddy, and the camera angle slowly tilts until the entire area is upside down. But these psychological flourishes are so fleeting that they feel almost out of place.

Neversong has just enough bells and whistles to suck you into its world, but not enough to compel your immersion. It’s a bit as if Brush has given players a coloring book, but only a single crayon, and so the game’s creativity ends up being flattened into a menial series of tasks. By the end of Neversong, the true story—or picture—behind Peet’s quest is arguably complete, but with just that one shade, it’s not particularly satisfying.

This game was reviewed using a press key provided by Atmos Games.

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 Developer: Atmos Games, Serenity Forge  Publisher: Serenity Forge  Platform: PC  Release Date: May 20, 2020  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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