At first glance, Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse presents a compelling fantasy. It’s a Metroidvania roguelike where you play not as a hero, but as a sentient witch’s hat, possessing the bodies of fallen enemies to navigate a cursed underworld. This novel premise, however, quickly collides with a core gameplay reality: awkward pacing that undermines its potential through repetitive exploration and jarring difficulty spikes.
The Promising Core of Possession
The game’s narrative sets the stage for a unique adventure. An ancient witch steals a young woman’s crystallized essence, triggering an explosion that scatters her body, half the crystal, and the titular hat into the depths below. You awaken as the hat, a disembodied consciousness with one primary ability: possession. Your first vessel is the girl’s own body, which you use to move, attack, and explore the ruins. The central mechanical twist is that you can detach from this body, floating freely as a hat to reach new areas, then use magic to respawn your primary vessel nearby. This creates a dynamic puzzle-solving and platforming loop that feels genuinely fresh in its opening hours.
Solid Foundations in Movement and Combat
When controlling the hat or your primary human vessel, the fundamentals are satisfyingly responsive. Attacks land with appropriate feedback, and the dodge roll provides a reliable escape. The act of possessing or releasing a body is seamless, mapped intuitively to the controller. You progress by battling enemies, collecting Blessings (passive buffs), Grimoires (active spells), and Spells that modify your abilities, all while unlocking doors and delving deeper. The roguelike progression is tied to a village hub. After each run, you return to this sanctuary to spend resources, construct new facilities like a Research Station or a Witch’s Cauldron, and permanently strengthen your character, gradually unlocking access to new biomes like a garden and an academy.
Where the Concept Begins to Crumble
The central promise of body-hopping, however, soon reveals its limitations. Despite being a headline feature, opportunities to strategically possess enemies feel fewer than anticipated. More critically, the utility of doing so is frequently questionable. An early possessable enemy, a skeletal hound, trades your human form’s agility and ladder-climbing for a slow, lumbering movement and a biting lunge attack. Later, a minotaur offers superior combat power but still feels less versatile than the balanced human form. The result is a mechanic that feels novel but underutilized and often suboptimal, discouraging experimentation.
The Pacing Problem: Repetition and Spikes
The game’s most significant issues are rooted in its pacing and world design. Although marketed with “auto-generated” dungeons that “change each time you play,” players report a pervasive sense of repetition. The same room layouts and enemy configurations recur with frustrating frequency, stripping the roguelike element of its essential surprise and variety. Exploration, a core pillar of the Metroidvania experience, becomes a chore rather than a discovery.
Difficulty and the Multiplayer Question
This repetition is compounded by severe and sudden difficulty spikes, particularly upon reaching the volcanic biome. Enemy damage, health pools, and debilitating status effects escalate dramatically, often forcing runs to an abrupt end. This steep climb feels less like a natural challenge curve and more like a wall, leading to speculation that the balancing may have been tuned with cooperative multiplayer in mind—a feature the game supports. For a solo player, the experience can shift from engaging to discouraging, as repeated attempts through familiar, punishing territory yield minimal progress.
A Village of Progress in a World of Stagnation
The village hub stands in stark contrast to the repetitive dungeons. It represents tangible, permanent progression. Building new structures and unlocking skill trees, like the Pillar of Survival obtained after the first boss, provides clear goals and a sense of growth. This safe haven is where the game’s long-term hooks are set, promising that each failed run contributes to future success. Yet, the journey from the village back into the static, spike-laden depths creates a disjointed rhythm that hampers the overall flow.
Technical Presentation and Availability
Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse is widely available, having launched on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC. Its visual style, while not groundbreaking, effectively conveys its gothic fantasy atmosphere, and the core controls remain a highlight. The technical foundation is solid, which makes the design-level pacing issues all the more noticeable; the game feels mechanically capable of more than it currently delivers.
Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse is a game of compelling ideas trapped in an inconsistent execution. Its unique possession mechanic offers flashes of brilliance, and the village progression provides a solid roguelike backbone. But these strengths are persistently undermined by a world that feels copy-pasted and a difficulty curve that punishes rather than challenges. The potential for a memorable adventure is undeniable, lying just beneath the surface, waiting perhaps for the right balance changes or a shift in design philosophy to let its novel heart beat without obstruction.
