Nekuia

Review

“Come to me, beautiful little light being”, summoned a stone statue in the middle of a cemetery. . . Who, me? Yes, who do you think I am referring to? You small floating thing beaming with light, of course it’s you! I am in a bit of a predicament; I lost my soul and I need you to help me to find it. Sounds fun, right! Go, little being, through this crypt door and find it for me! Good luck little being, you’ll need it.

Nekuia is an action / 2D platformer game were you take control of a blue being who has to travel through four worlds to recover a lost soul.

Most of the levels are fairly small but it could take you many attempts to clear each one of them. Expect to die a lot and you will respawn at the start of that particular level. It might bring something out of your inner character that you never thought you had! Each world has a few stages which are longer and harder to finish; these have tombstones in them and every time you pass one your progress will be saved in case you stuff up in the next few seconds (thanks god for that!) And this, my friend, is only playing on the easy difficulty! Venture onto the medium or hard difficulty and your voice will gradually will become louder and louder. . . Nekuia is truly a challenging game. Each world has a boss to defeat and when you do so, you will unlock the new world.

Gameplay-wise, the mechanisms of Nekuia are pretty simple. Your being can only jump or double jump. However, if you execute a fluid streak of jumps (without stopping), your being will increase speed and the length of the jump each time you do so, and with good control, you might complete a stage in seconds! It happened to me once or twice.

Obstacle like spikes will be laid out all over the levels with gaps between them (small or large) for your little blue being to land safely here and there. Safely, if you take your time and don’t try to set a new time record.

Graphically the game looks very good, with well-designed levels, but I find the controls a bit hard to get used to. I think playing with the gamepad is slightly easier to play than with the mouse.