I can’t help but feel that “2D game where you’re fending off nightly, increasingly strong attacks while you collect resources to build things and try to stay healthy” should have its own specific genre name. Neverliria is one such game, with the twist separating it from games like The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands and Symmetry being that you have to use light to keep at bay the shadow monsters staging nighttime raids. This light exists mostly in the form of fires that you can set and maintain by using wood obtained by chopping down trees, though there are rare phoenixes that can function a bit like infinite fires, and also totems (which I placed in a bad spot and never learned the value of—more on that later). Neverliria‘s underlying goal isn’t immediately clear, as tends to be the case with games like this, but given the way new structures slowly unlock as you explore the area and use buildings to transform resources into different resources, it looks like you’re meant to build up your strength until you can bring the fight to the shadow monsters who terrorize you nightly.

Eating is crucial in Neverliria

Neverliria‘s protagonist (referred to as “the fire-headed girl” by the store page) has two sets of icons at the top-left of the screen, with the hearts denoting her health and the circles denoting her fullness. Starving her results in a game over, as I quickly discovered, though she can eat the corn littered around the world to restore one point to her fullness. You won’t be able to rely on what you find for long, however, so using corn to craft regenerating fields of corn is crucial to keeping her fed. Especially because naturally-occurring resources in Neverliria (wood, corn, etc) can only be harvested once before they disappear forever. If you run around eating corn instead of growing it, you’ll eventually run out and be unable to either eat or craft something that grows food, at which point the fire-headed girl is left to slowly starve to death.

Fires aren’t a solution for long

I recorded an hour and a half or so of footage, but got called away for a short time. That turned out to be a good thing, though, as it turns out that Neverliria saves your progress when you exit. The video above starts from where I picked back off, and while I was doing fairly well, a new enemy showed up who had the ability to snuff out my fires by shooting arrows at them. Since shadow enemies destroy your buildings, that opened the floodgates and a bunch of my buildings ended up being destroyed. Then I was killed by an arrow while testing whether you can outrun arrows. You can’t. Basically, you have a few nights before fires become useless, and the only way of figuring out things like this is through repeated cheap deaths.

I’m on the fence at the moment

There are a lot of things about Neverliria that I absolutely adore. Chest storage being a bag of holding accessible from any chest you create makes it possible to speed things up by building and placing them in strategic spots, keeping you from having slowly to lug one all over the place, and stacking a huge pile of wood or corn up is as weirdly entertaining as placing a chest on top of these piles to quickly hoover everything up. What really stopped my fun in its tracks was my third attempt in the video above, which I’m including in full. In it, I chose to use the stone resource I mined to construct some additional buildings instead of repairing a bridge, using the broken bridge to ensure enemies only came from one direction while I built up my resources. This worked pretty well, and I eventually ended up with a phoenix that took the place of my fires. I even managed to fend off one of the arrow enemies with some dwarf allies you can obtain by restoring a certain building. The repeated failures that I had no way of predicting were annoying, but Neverliria was still fun.

Then I ran out of resources. I needed more dwarves to protect the fire-headed girl at night, but you need alcohol to obtain dwarves, and alcohol requires using a windmill to crush corn that you later mix with herbs. Sadly, my windmill had been destroyed by one of the nightly raids because the dwarves only guard specific points (another thing you have no way of knowing or planning around until you’ve either gotten lucky or made a game-ruining mistake), and building another windmill required three stones. I had used up all of my stones building everything in the first place, though, and the stone quarry that looks to mine more stone requires a dwarf. Mine had become guards by this point, which they couldn’t be unassigned from, so I found myself caught in a soft game over despite the fire-headed girl remaining alive; I needed alcohol to obtain dwarves, stone to obtain alcohol, and dwarves to obtain stone. This could be worked around if the stone quarry (which I’m assuming mines stone, though I can’t say for certain yet) could be crafted using stone early on, allowing you to build regenerating supplies of corn, wood, and stone at the start, but the stone quarry only becomes available later on and it’s easy to get yourself stuck. Even then, an enemy coming along and smashing the buildings that regenerate those resources could similarly trap you. I want to love Neverliria, but it’s incredibly frustrating how many ways there are to unwittingly block off your progression.

Blind decisions are bad decisions

At the start, I mentioned the totem that I placed in a bad spot and was subsequently never in a position to figure out the purpose of. It glows gently, leading me to suspect that it repels most enemies like other lights do, but there are no tooltips that explain what anything does. It’s all guesswork, and when I expanded my little village outward, the totem ended up at the center. Enemies who reach the center of your village have most likely destroyed enough buildings that you’re screwed (either because of direct attacks or resource scarcity), and you’re best served retreating as far as you can at that point. When I loaded my save back up to try and figure totems out, though, all of my structures were destroyed. Even my guard dwarves were gone. I was already unable to progress further, but knowing that even the save can’t be trusted isn’t reassuring considering that Neverliria is designed in a way that has you constantly replaying the same hour plus of gameplay while figuring things out.

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