Patches can make a world of difference, though it’s easy to forget that given the way some developers drag their heels and/or simply give up on fixing issues. Every so often, however, the little things that bother you about a game will end up being almost entirely remedied, and that’s very much the case with atmospheric 2D survival game Neverliria. There were all kinds of things about it that I found incredibly unfair at launch, such as buildings not telling you what they do ahead of time and a paucity of resources that could unexpectedly make further progression impossible, and these are the things that have been solved. As a result, Neverliria is now easily recommendable as a bite-sized, deeply atmospheric survival game.
Neverliria fixed almost everything
The first thing you’re likely to notice is the way mousing over buildings in the build menu now provides a description of what they do. You still can’t tell which ingredients you’ll need to produce that resource ahead of time, but you’re flying much less blind now. This strikes a good balance between asking the player to figure things out and making the general gameplay much more intuitive for newcomers.
Another thing that I noticed was that there were more rock resources littered around the world. These are still consumable, so carelessly mismanaging your stone can get you into trouble, but there used to be almost no margin for error. Now you can spare enough stone to construct a Wall or two, and that’s doubly useful now that walls can’t be destroyed by enemies anymore. That’s not all—bow-wielding enemies can still shoot arrows that follow you for implausibly long distances, but walls seem to stop arrows now. Honestly, that might have always been the case; constructing walls was an impractical enough use of resources that they were best avoided at release, so I didn’t have a lot of experience with them until this recent playthrough.
The other big change that I appreciate is the way you receive a warning at noon whenever that night’s attack is going to include a new enemy. This not only gives you some time to prepare accordingly, but benefits the “barely surviving” atmosphere by informing you that something new is coming that you might not be prepared to handle. It’s an elegantly simple solution to one of my biggest Neverliria criticisms.
There are still some minor quirks, though
You may have noticed an NPC facing the wrong way for the direction they’re walking earlier, moonwalking in the process, and that actually happened something like three separate times over the course of my playthrough. It’s purely cosmetic and not a big deal, though. In fact, it’s kind of charmingly weird. The only real bug I faced was a familiar one involving chests becoming stuck to your character. This is a problem since you have to eat to survive, with the chest automatically sucking up food items before you can pick them up, and the solution is a familiar one: quit out so that your progress is saved, then load that save back up and keep going. The cause of this bug seems to be related to opening the build menu and building something before a dropped chest hits the ground, though the correlation might not imply causation.
The physics also seem a bit more fun now, though it’s hard to know if anything has changed on that front or if I just got lucky with the positioning in a way that caused loafs of bread to jump around like a bunch of grasshoppers. That never happened during my previous playthroughs, but the physics were (and still are) entertaining, allowing you to pump a ton of ingredients into a building and watch as the resulting item piled up into the sky. Little things like that are always fun to play around with.
This has really turned the corner
Pretty much everything that bothered me in Neverliria‘s original release has been ironed out or mitigated in some way, which makes it easy to recommend now given its low price and great atmosphere. I certainly enjoyed playing through it again.
The post After a few patches, Neverliria’s in great shape appeared first on Killa Penguin.
