Neverway is a horror RPG Stardew Valley from one of the artists behind Celeste

Today in ‘game pitches that would keep you reading a novel if they were the first line’ is Neverway, a horror RPG with life sim bits from Coldblood Inc. Burnt out from years working a dead-end job, Fiona (and I’ll quote this directly because it’s the blasé single sentence that did it for me) “starts over on a farm and becomes the immortal herald of a dead god”. Lovely stuff. Cucumbers. Carrots. Cthulhu. City slickers will say it’s fake, but we’ve seen the punchline to this whole cosmic joke, squirming between the beets.

Quick. Hit it. Hit the punchline with combat inspired by Zelda: A Link To The Past. Then, retire to the farm for the evening. You can advance time whenever you want, moving through a “slow-burn horror story” told in cutscenes inspired by Mother 3. Make friends. Maybe date them. Craft things. Catch fish. Maybe date the fish? Not clear. “Unlock combat abilities through friendship bonds”. Farm. Do it all while listening to noises by Dome Keeper’s Martin Kvale and Hyper Light Drifter’s Disasterpeace. “Keep your life from falling apart”.

Coldblood Inc. themselves are a triumvirate of illustrious play weavers, with artist and designer Pedro Medeiros having worked on Celeste and Towerfall, and coder Isadora Sophia having built the open-source ‘Murder Engine’ on which the game is built. In the same way that owning, say, a very nifty synth is a good way to convince yourself to learn piano, I predict that a non-zero amount of people will learn to make games, simply so they can say they’re fluent in the nuances of the Murder Engine. Neat.

Neverway is self-published with funding from Among Us’s Outersloth. Release is still TBA. The answer, my friend, may be squirming between the beets.