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

Thoughts on the demo

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, plant pots, office printers and other fittings that have become vessels for demons. From this premise springs a note of tragedy powerful enough to conquer my outrage at a game title that has brackets in it. The demons are not, in themselves, violent – it’s inhabiting the inanimate that maddens them. “Possessing something cold and dead is agony… so they lash out,” explains Rhem, a mortally wounded devil you meet in the prologue.

The demon invasion is also more of an uprising, triggered by a nefarious corporation, Agradyne, who have been bottling the fiends like bacteria and carrying out dreadful experiments. Or at least, such is my understanding after 20 minutes with a demo at a Devolver event last week. It all makes me feel positively awful about chain-whipping the hellspawn for power-up points. And yet. Here’s a trailer.

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Aside from making me reconsider my prejudices against demons, Possessor is notable for some winsome anime character design. You are Luca, a snub-nosed, apple-cheeked teenager who loses her legs while trying to escape the interdimensional onslaught. Luca is saved from death by raven-haired hellboy Rhem, who is himself in need of a fresh body after getting his chest ripped open. With Rhem tagging along as one of the titular possessors, Luca both regrows her legs and acquires a sizzling set of knives, a combat grapple, a wall-kick, a double-jump, and more besides. It’s clearly a Faustian pact, possibly also a doomed romance, but hush now, away with your talk of Consequences – there are new abilities to unlock, and weapons to find.

The game is set in a huge, trashed, quarantined city with some kind of Berserk-ass singularity popping off in the background. It’s a towering expanse of soft neon glows and gladiatorial shadows, very much a depth I’m willing to plumb, though I’m not yet blown away by the combat.

It works well enough, once you adjust to some slightly curt animations, but so far, it’s playing the hits – dodge, combo, launch. I do like the ordinariness of the tools: one of the early secondary weapons is a computer mouse you swing by its cable. See, this is why new computing tech isn’t automatically better computing tech. Can’t juggle underworld hooligans with a bluetooth connection, can you? Later you get a guitar – “shredding” is a word with at least two senses – and a hockey stick.

I broke off playing the demo after I was saddled with the sub-objective of locating somebody’s eyeballs so that I could fool the retina scanners for a laboratory door. I stopped playing mostly because I was at an event and on the clock, but it’s also fair to say that being handed a key quest blunted the enthusiasm amassed by the world and characters.

Still, this feels both more florid than many metroidvanias and more sensitive in its writing, as you might expect from some of the people behind Hyper Light Drifter and, less positively, Hyper Light Breaker. I will end with the throwaway thought that the main characters remind me a bit of the lead characters from volleyball anime Haikyuu. Probably, a volleyball would make a sensible addition to Luca’s arsenal. More stopping power than a hockey stick, surely? Anyway, you can read more about the demo on Steam.