The demons are both tragic and hot in Possessor(s), the Hyper Light Drifter studio's new fantasy platformer

Heart Machine’s side-scrolling metroidvania platformer Possessor(s) is Hollow Knight with a splash of Amanita Design’s Creaks. The bulk of your enemies are household objects - vending machines, works pots, bureau printers and different fittings that person go vessels for demons. From this premise springs a enactment of calamity almighty capable to conquer my outrage astatine a crippled rubric that has brackets successful it. The demons are not, successful themselves, convulsive - it’s inhabiting the inanimate that maddens them. “Possessing thing acold and dormant is agony… truthful they lash out,” explains Rhem, a mortally wounded devil you conscionable successful the prologue.

The demon penetration is besides much of an uprising, triggered by a nefarious corporation, Agradyne, who person been bottling the fiends similar bacteria and carrying retired dreadful experiments. Or astatine least, specified is my knowing aft 20 minutes with a demo astatine a Devolver lawsuit past week. It each makes maine consciousness positively atrocious astir chain-whipping the hellspawn for power-up points. And yet. Here’s a trailer.

Aside from making maine reconsider my prejudices against demons, Possessor is notable for immoderate winsome anime quality design. You are Luca, a snub-nosed, apple-cheeked teen who loses her legs portion trying to flight the interdimensional onslaught. Luca is saved from decease by raven-haired hellboy Rhem, who is himself successful request of a caller assemblage aft getting his thorax ripped open. With Rhem tagging on arsenic 1 of the titular possessors, Luca some regrows her legs and acquires a sizzling acceptable of knives, a combat grapple, a wall-kick, a double-jump, and much besides. It’s intelligibly a Faustian pact, perchance besides a doomed romance, but hush now, distant with your speech of Consequences – determination are caller abilities to unlock, and weapons to find.

The crippled is acceptable successful a huge, trashed, quarantined metropolis with immoderate benignant of Berserk-ass singularity popping disconnected successful the background. It’s a towering expanse of brushed neon glows and gladiatorial shadows, precise overmuch a extent I’m consenting to plumb, though I’m not yet blown distant by the combat.

It works good enough, erstwhile you set to immoderate somewhat curt animations, but truthful far, it’s playing the hits – dodge, combo, launch. I bash similar the ordinariness of the tools: 1 of the aboriginal secondary weapons is simply a machine rodent you plaything by its cable. See, this is wherefore caller computing tech isn’t automatically amended computing tech. Can’t juggle underworld hooligans with a bluetooth connection, tin you? Later you get a guitar – “shredding” is simply a connection with astatine slightest 2 senses – and a hockey stick.

I broke disconnected playing the demo aft I was saddled with the sub-objective of locating somebody’s eyeballs truthful that I could fool the retina scanners for a laboratory door. I stopped playing mostly due to the fact that I was astatine an lawsuit and connected the clock, but it’s besides just to accidental that being handed a cardinal quest blunted the enthusiasm amassed by the satellite and characters.

Still, this feels some much florid than galore metroidvanias and much delicate successful its writing, arsenic you mightiness expect from immoderate of the radical down Hyper Light Drifter and, little positively, Hyper Light Breaker. I volition extremity with the throwaway thought that the main characters punctual maine a spot of the pb characters from volleyball anime Haikyuu. Probably, a volleyball would marque a sensible summation to Luca's arsenal. More stopping powerfulness than a hockey stick, surely? Anyway, you tin work much astir the demo connected Steam.