At Devolver Direct 2024, publishing studio Devolver Digital announced a new project with indie LA based studio Heart Machine. Heart Machine was founded in 2013 by Alx Preston as the studio behind the pixel project Hyper Light Drifter (2016), which was funded through Kickstarter. Heart Machine focuses on games that offer fun, fluid, and engaging gameplay through vivid stories, audio, and visuals.
Possessor(s) is an action platformer side-scroller with 3D backgrounds and hand drawn 2D character sprites. It has combat inspired by platform fighters and a dynamic story that has a semi open world structure within the game.
Gameplay still of Possessor(s)
The player plays as Luca and Luca’s ‘counterpart’ Rehm. The two explore a city and its inhabitants post-destruction. Gameplay features tight platforming and precise combat along with different, upgradable weapons. The trailer shows the trademark neon palette of Heart Machine’s games, although Possessor(s) has a more gritty palette than its predecessors. In an Instagram post, the studio lists a few inspirations for the game such as Signalis (2022), INSIDE (2016), TV show Severance (2022) and VanderMeer’s AreaX/Annihilation series.
Possessor(s), according to a devlog, is game about relationships, “specifically the ones that hurt us and how we navigate through them”. While there is no release date, the Steam page confirms that the main platform will be PC (Windows) and that the game supports keyboard and mouse. However, the devs recommend playing the game using a controller.