POSSESSOR(S)
For: PS5, XBOX, PC
From: Heart Machine / Devolver
★★★
REVIEWED BY BEN ALLAN
Publishers Devolver are always bringing interesting stuff from the indy gaming scene to a wider audience - good one, Devolver, love your work - and on this occasion it’s Possessor(s), a Metroidvania-esque title from Heart Machine, the studio behind the hit Hyper Light Drifter.
In Possessor(s), players take the role of Luca, a teen girl who lives in a city where society, the economy etc., are all in thrall to corporate behemoth Agradyne Systems, who you can tell are up to no good just from that perfect "evil sci-fi megacorp" name. Sure enough, whatever they are up to unleashes some kind of cataclysm on the city, exploding a bunch of demons into the world so they can promptly go on a murder spree. Luca is grievously injured in the chaos, and witnesses a friend being killed; to survive she has to enter a pact with a demon called Rhem - a bit of a jerk - who has motivations of his own. Duly demon-enhanced, Luca sets off into the ruins with the twin goals of revenge and finding out what has happened to her family.
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of demons lurking about. These guys have latched on to whatever hosts they can find in Luca’s world, which means not only people, but also inanimate objects. As Rhem explains, this drives them a bit feral, so you’ll need to get ready to deal with a lot of the homicidal potplants, filing cabinets and paperbacks that explain the (s) of the game’s name.
If there’s a top reason to give Possessor(s) a look in a busy gaming year, it’s the very stylish art design, which plonks animated characters down in front of 3-D backdrops. It all looks natty, and it’s fun to see how the likes of school globes or IT equipment have manifested as demons. There are some cool, comic-style character designs for the narrative as well, which plays out through character-and-dialogue panels reminiscent of visual novels or Hades (though there’s no voice work here).
So, it all looks and plays nicely at a basic level, but as the game goes on, Possessor(s)’ flaws become a bit more apparent. Opting for a maximum player freedom, the game more or less gives you an overarching goal - collect what you need to open the Agradyne vault and get Rhem home - and sets you loose in its gigantic map.
The trouble is a fun sense of exploration quickly dissipates as it becomes apparent that probing that map’s nooks and crannies often produces nothing much in particular. The problem of feeling adrift in the game is compounded by often irritating placement of checkpoints and (separate) fast travel points, making for a lot of backtracking through respawning enemies, or fighting through the same sequence multiple times just to get to the start of a boss area (the worst). It’s easy to play for 20 minutes at a time without feeling you’re making any progress at all, trapped in a backwater loop on the map trying to get to a vague end destination which turns out to be a door you can’t open yet. Back you go through all those angry filing cabinets.
It’s a shame, because there’s obviously a lot of care that’s been put into the game’s look and feel, and the story is interesting enough - when, by chance, you find yourself doing the right things to actually make it advance. Whether it was a major factor or not, it’s hard not to think about the final state of the game in the context of Heart Machine’s publicised financial difficulties, which led to the team that developed Possessor(s) being laid off just ahead of its release. (Ah, the games industry.)
At times Possessor(s) is firing on all cylinders, and it never looks less than great. But a bit too often the dreaded word "slog" may rise unbidden to your mind. Sadly, we have to file another one under "could have been great".
