Possessor(s) Breakdown lyfter fram en slående värld som undergrävs av hastig design

The Possessor(s) review of Heart Machine’s fourth title arrives in a year already defined by heavyweight metroidvanias. Two months after Hollow Knight: Silksong reset expectations again, Possessor(s) lands with its own ambitions: a small-scale 2D action platformer wrapped in comic-styled animation, queer themes, and a post-apocalyptic setting shaped by corporate hubris. Its visual identity stands out, but recurring design gaps and unsteady execution temper nearly every strength.

This report draws from Leo Faierman’s review on ScreenRant, which examined the game in detail.

Possessor(s) follows Luca, a resident of Sanzu City, a metropolis built around Agradyne Systems, a tech megacorporation whose experiments tear open a magical rift across the urban grid. Demons spill through the rupture, able to possess people, animals, and objects. In the opening moments, Luca witnesses her friend Kaz killed by one of the creatures before she is crushed in the collapse, losing both legs below the knee. A demon named Rhem discovers her, proposes a shared-body pact, and replaces her missing limbs with sharpened, spike-like prosthetics. The two become uneasy partners as Luca searches for her missing parents, fights Agradyne’s escaped experiments, and uncovers the role Rhem and other demons played in the corporation’s sealed laboratory programs.

The premise supports a steady flow of visual ideas. Streets break into shards of neon light and displaced geometry. Demons mimic everyday items but distort them into lean, barbed silhouettes. Cutscenes present these moments with bold comic-panel weight, and the 3D backgrounds carry heavy shadows that contrast the flatter character art. The style signals tension, collapse, and the sense of an environment buckling under unresolved corporate excess. Yet the visual cohesion wears thin during extended stretches of movement. Most areas use similar silhouettes and lighting, and the absence of voiced dialogue keeps long sections of exploration quiet enough to blur biomes together.

Combat leans on household objects transformed into weapons. Luca carries one melee tool and up to three sidearms. The concept frames ordinary tools as vehicles for demonic power: a hockey stick warped by alien energy, a computer mouse that fires bursts, a cell phone that triggers a small area blast, and a baseball that serves as a simple ranged hit. The charm fades once their limits become clear. Each melee weapon has one light combo. Sidearms operate on a basic special-charge system and never develop deeper mechanics. Upgrades add relic-style slots with small perks like health regeneration or chroma bonuses, but they do not introduce new abilities or build toward larger systems. Damage remains opaque, with little feedback on scaling or impact.

Enemy design offers sharper imagination. A file cabinet becomes a rolling mass of drawers and teeth. A plant in a vase skitters across hallways like a small, rigid insect. Larger encounters push these motifs further, but the animation falls short of the concepts. Motion often looks like frames being dragged, especially in boss fights, where jumps and lateral moves resemble icons sliding across a screen. It gives the set pieces a rough, unfinished quality that undercuts their intended scale.

The fast-travel system adds to the sense of disjointed structure. Save portals operate as clear anchor points, yet fast travel ties only to train stations scattered unevenly across the map. Some stations sit far from save points, turning backtracking into long detours. The system appears built to stretch the playtime rather than streamline progression. Several quests reinforce the problem. Tens, a capable warrior encountered early on, offers a chain of miniboss hunts that spans much of the runtime, but her final reward amounts to a minor crafting material with little relevance. Other tasks send Luca to rooms filled with difficult platforming or dense combat, only to yield items with negligible value.

The map compounds the frustration. Fog marks unexplored sectors, but some blocks never clear even after exhaustive backtracking. Given Luca’s limited movement set, the map often suggests routes that no ability can unlock. Players who rely on full completion indicators encounter empty ends and unclear paths, amplifying the sense of an unfinished navigation layer.

Animation remains the sharpest dividing line. Luca’s run cycle uses few frames, as do her jumps, dodges, and parries. Enemy tells follow the same pattern. Timing becomes guesswork when a monster rears back without readable anticipation. The problem intensifies in combat rooms packed with flying enemies. Luca’s whip exists to pull them down, swing across gaps, or drag objects, but it clings indiscriminately to anything in range, including enemies off-screen. A planned swing sequence can stall the moment the whip snaps to the wrong target, disrupting momentum without warning.

Despite the uneven mechanics, the core story threads show more substance. Luca and Rhem’s partnership shifts from reluctant survival pact to something closer to emotional entanglement. Rhem’s influence mixes power, dependence, and admiration, while Luca’s trust unravels as she uncovers Agradyne’s records of demon experiments and erased failures. Their exchanges deepen the game’s central theme: the difficulty of distinguishing genuine connection from codependency disguised as need. Later chapters settle into a more intimate rhythm as the narrative leans on that relationship rather than the broader catastrophe around them.

Still, the broader pressure on metroidvanias this year makes Possessor(s) hard to elevate. Its atmosphere catches the eye, and certain narrative beats land with clarity. But platforming, traversal, and combat rarely evolve. Limited weapon depth, sparse upgrades, rigid movement, and unpredictable collisions reduce challenge variety. Encounters with airborne mobs slow pacing, damage feedback feels inconsistent, and stunlock deaths appear without clear player error. Several animation gaps contribute to miscues during parries and tight jumps. Even water-adjacent jumps behave with irregular timing, cutting into the internal logic of movement.

Boss battles illustrate the range of the game’s intentions and its limits. Their forms draw from mundane references—traffic elements, office debris—twisted into hunched demons or sharp-edged hulks. Yet fights often rely on similar movement loops and simple attack patterns. The lack of refined telegraphs flattens encounters that should act as anchors in a metroidvania’s arc. Combat rooms placed after new ability pickups offer difficulty spikes but rarely culminate in meaningful rewards, creating a pattern that repeats across major biomes.

The backdrop, however, remains one of the game’s stronger qualities. Sanzu City’s divisions—corporate towers, abandoned districts, overwritten transit routes—frame the aftermath of Agradyne’s actions. Environmental logs detail the corporation’s test cycles, containment failures, and attempts to manage demon intelligence, giving the world a sense of missed warning signs rather than total surprise. NPCs refer to vanished colleagues, broken neighborhoods, and resources siphoned to hidden labs, grounding the city’s collapse in socioeconomic stress more than dramatic catastrophe.

Possessor(s) ends on a personal note. Luca’s final confrontation forces her to examine the nature of her bond with Rhem and the line between empowerment and surrender. The closing scenes circle back to the early loss of Kaz, tying emotional unrest to action rather than spectacle. The resolution carries sincerity, even as mechanical shortcomings from earlier chapters linger in memory.

As a whole, the game delivers a distinct aesthetic and a heartfelt story, but the surrounding structure limits its impact. Ideas appear in place without a final round of refinement. The style promises momentum, yet movement stops short. Combat begins with novelty, then settles into repetition. Exploration offers the shape of secrets without their substance. In a quieter release year, the results might land differently. In this one, Possessor(s) reads as an ambitious project pressed into completion before its systems could mature.

Released on PC and built in Unreal Engine 5, the title carries an M rating for violence, gore, and language. OpenCritic’s early scores place it around the low-70s average, with fewer than half of critics recommending it. The mixed reception reflects the game’s visible potential and its unfinished edges.

Here’s Posssessor(s) Steam page.