Possessor(s)

After three rounds of layoffs this year and Hyper Light Breaker’s curtailed development in early access, a lot seems to rest for Heart Machine on this plucky Metroidvania side project. The studio has an obvious knack for conjuring up fascinating fantasy worlds, but since its compact debut, Hyper Light Drifter, it’s been less obvious whether it can manage projects of a larger scale. And perhaps, on that count, even the modest Possessor(s) isn’t quite modest enough — it feels as much a victim of the company’s production woes as a showcase for its creative talent.

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That talent is in evidence from the game’s off-kilter setup, through which Heart Machine brings sly humour to otherwise formulaic constructs. Protagonist Luca begins the game with a greater disadvantage than most Metroidvania characters — the loss of her legs. Trapped in a city in the throes of demonic invasion, she barely survives an attack in which her best friend is killed, then slumps down in front of a mortally wounded demon, Rhem, who offers her a deal: if he possesses her, he can give her new legs, but she has to help him return home. In no position to haggle, Luca accepts the terms.

As Luca grows in power — in no time you add dodge-dash and wall-jump abilities, and get to swing around on a whip like a Belmont — it’s at the cost of sharing her body with an alien entity that can access her thoughts and potentially consume her mind. From there, as if stuck in some occult-cursed sitcom scenario, Luca and Rhem make a fine odd-couple act, bickering and demanding emotional privacy in the psychic equivalent of a bedsit. We soon learn that Rhem has as much right to feel aggrieved at the situation as Luca, since the demons were brought to the Earthly dimension by a corporation that’s been extracting energy from them through torture, which explains why the eventual outbreak has led to furious reprisals.

There are touches of the lo-fi grubbiness of