Heart Machine's Next Game Isn't At All What I Expected, But I Liked It

Heart Machine's Next Game Isn't At All What I Expected, But I Liked It https://ift.tt/aHAkzw4

At GDC 2025, I watched a walkthrough of one of the early levels of Possessor(s), the next game from Heart Machine. The studio typically goes for action games but mixes in a little bit of something else--2016's Hyper Light Drifter had RPG elements, 2021's Solar Ash was an adventure-platformer, and 2025's Hyper Light Breaker is a cooperative roguelike. Possessor(s) is a metroidvania or, as Heart Machine prefers to call it, a search-action game (which, honestly, is such a better term for the genre).

A sidescroller, Possessor(s) sees you play as two characters: Luca, a teenage girl, and Rehm, the demon possessing her. I didn't get to see the events that led to their partnership, but the Heart Machine team explained that the start of Possessor(s) sees Luca caught up in an interdimensional catastrophe that rips a hole in the sky and kills everyone she loves--it's only because of the intervention of the strange horned man now within her that she survives.

During Luca and Rehm's journey, they'll encounter objects possessed by feral demons.

Rehm also gives Luca artificial legs (I don't know what happened to her original legs, but I assume the full game will clue us in), so that she can jump higher and survive falls from any height, and Luca uses these new prosthetics to navigate the now-quarantined city in hopes of escaping it and learning more about how the catastrophe happened. The duo regularly converse about their substantially different views of demons and the corporation responsible for most everything in the city, alleviating much of the sense of loneliness that I've come to expect in other search-action games.

Continue Reading at GameSpot