Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse

Every few months another studio tries to fuse the Metroidvania and the roguelite, and every few months we relearn why it’s hard. The two genres want opposite things. A Metroidvania rewards memory: you learn the map, you notice the ledge you can’t reach yet, and you come back for it. A roguelite punishes memory by reshuffling the deck every run. The interesting question is never whether a game combines them. It’s which side the game gives up.

Never Grave: The Witch and the Curse, developed by Frontside 180 and published by Pocketpair Publishing (the publishing arm of the studio behind Palworld), answers that question with a hat. You play a witch who travels with a cursed hat that can possess enemies and take over their abilities. That one mechanic carries most of the game. It’s your combat toolkit, your traversal kit, and the nearest thing the game has to classic Metroidvania ability gating. Dungeons such as ancient ruins and botanical gardens are procedurally generated, so the layout changes every run. Between expeditions you haul materials back to a ruined village, where you farm, cook, and build facilities that grant permanent upgrades.

The game launched on March 4, 2026 on Steam and Nintendo platforms, with an Android version also available. It costs $12.74. It supports four-player online co-op, and the PC version supports cross-play with other platforms.

The design tells one consistent story: a strong core with too little around it. The game is aimed at the Dead Cells and Hades audience, with a farming-sim side dish, and it competes with both on mechanics alone, without their depth.

• Cursed-Hat Possession: The hat lets you seize control of enemies and use their abilities. It drives both combat and traversal, so every enemy type is a potential tool.
• Procedurally Generated Dungeons: Biomes like ancient ruins and botanical gardens reassemble each run, which reshuffles routes and encounters.
• Run Traits: Traits collected mid-run push your build in different directions, on top of whatever you’ve possessed.
• Village Rebuilding: Materials from expeditions fund farming, cooking, and facility construction, and those facilities grant permanent upgrades for future runs.
• Four-Player Online Co-op: Up to four witches can explore together, and the PC version supports cross-play.
• Broad Platform Support: Steam, Nintendo platforms, and Android.

The Hat Is the Game

Start with what works, because it works well. Most action roguelites hand you power through loot: a new weapon, a stat-bending relic, a boon from a god. Never Grave hands you power through its enemy roster. Every creature in a dungeon is both a threat and an inventory slot. That changes how you approach a fight. You stop asking “how do I kill this?” and start asking “do I want to be this?”

The answer has consequences. Possession governs combat and movement alike, so the enemy you inhabit decides how you fight and also where you can go. That’s a clever answer to the genre’s central contradiction. Traditional Metroidvanias gate progress behind permanent upgrades like the double jump and the dash. Never Grave can’t rely on permanent gates in a world that rebuilds itself every run, so it makes the gates situational. The key to the next room might be walking around the current one.

The design leans on enemy variety, and here that matters more than it would elsewhere. When enemies are your moveset, a thin bestiary would be fatal. A wide range of enemy designs gives the player a wide range of things to do.

Combat layers magic spells, terrain, and stolen powers against bosses tuned to be tough. A possession system lives or dies on how quickly the swap responds. If jumping into an enemy feels sticky, the fantasy collapses into input management. The design clearly understands this: the whole loop is built around fast, frequent body swaps, and anything less would sink it.

The Roguelite Loop: Traits Without Teeth

Traits picked up during a run are meant to shift your playstyle, and in principle they pair well with possession: the enemy gives you an ability, and the trait modifies it. The best roguelites make that pairing feel combinatorial. Hades’ duo boons and Dead Cells’ mutation synergies let two unremarkable pieces combine into something absurd.

Never Grave’s trait layer has many systems and few of them go deep. A trait that nudges a number isn’t a build. It’s a rounding error. When the ceiling on synergies is low, runs start to blur together, and procedural generation can’t fix that. Reshuffled rooms change the route but not your decisions. A new layout stops feeling new much sooner than a new build would.

The Village: A Second Game That Isn’t Finished

Between runs you return to a ruined village to grow crops, cook, and build facilities that grant permanent upgrades. On paper this is the right call. A meta-progression hub gives failed runs meaning, and a cozy farming loop is a pleasant break between punishing boss fights.

In practice the village is the weakest part of the design. It’s shallow, and it’s tied directly to the other major problem, grindy progression. Those two issues feed each other. When permanent upgrades run through a farming-and-crafting layer that doesn’t stand up as an activity of its own, the hub stops being a reward and becomes a toll booth. You aren’t building a home. You’re paying upkeep so the next run is survivable.

That’s a structural problem, not a content problem. Hades’ hub works because the story lives there, so every return pays off. Never Grave’s lore is thin, so the village can’t use narrative to make the trip worthwhile. It has to rely on its systems, and the systems aren’t deep enough to carry it.

Co-op Changes the Math

Four-player online co-op is where Never Grave makes its strongest case. Possession scales naturally to multiplayer: four players inhabiting four different enemies is improvised team composition with no menus involved. The grind is also easier to swallow with friends, because repetition is more tolerable when it’s social.

Cross-play on PC matters here as well. Co-op games wither when their player base is split across storefronts, and letting Steam players match with other platforms widens the pool.

Co-op is the way this game is meant to be played. Alone, its thinness shows. In a group, the chaos of four possessed bodies covers most of the gaps.

The visuals are the least controversial thing about Never Grave. The biome concepts give the art strong visual identities to work with. Overgrown botanical gardens and crumbling ruins are familiar settings, but they’re legible and distinct, which matters in a game where the layout changes under your feet.

The interface has a harder job than most. Possession states, spells, terrain effects, traits, and up to three teammates all compete for screen space, and four-player fights are the stress test for whether any of that stays readable. A game built this fast needs an HUD that stays quiet, and it’s an open question whether this one does at maximum chaos.

On performance, the design itself sets the bar: a game built on fast body swaps needs responsive movement and combat above all else. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, so the main risk on older machines is input latency rather than raw power.

Steam: This is the reference version and the most flexible one. Cross-play is confirmed on PC, which makes Steam the safest choice if your co-op group is spread across platforms. Mouse and keyboard work, but this is a 2D action game with demanding bosses, so a controller is the better fit.

Nintendo (Switch / Switch 2): Short, self-contained runs suit handheld play, and tending crops in portable mode is a better use of the village than sitting at a desk for it. If you own both systems, Switch 2 is the safer bet. Busy four-player fights are exactly the situation that strains older hardware. Confirm cross-play support for your platform before you plan sessions with PC friends.

Android: This is the hardest sell. Virtual buttons give no tactile feedback, which is a poor match for precision combat and tough bosses, and a possession system that depends on quick inputs suffers more than most from on-screen controls. If you play on Android, pair a controller. The village layer is the one part of the game that suits touch naturally, which is a little ironic given that it’s the weakest part.

Never Grave has one great idea and a dozen decent ones. The great idea, a hat that turns every enemy into a weapon and every room into a puzzle about who to become, is strong enough to carry the game further than its supporting systems deserve. The enemy roster gives possession real range, and co-op turns the whole thing into a pleasantly chaotic group activity.

The supporting systems are where it falls short. The village is a chore wearing a cozy sweater, the traits rarely produce memorable builds, and the thin lore leaves nothing to pull you through the grind. Frontside 180 built a strong core and then spread its effort across too many systems instead of deepening a few.

If the studio spends its post-launch time deepening the village and the trait pool rather than adding to them, Never Grave could grow into something special. As it stands, we rate it Mixed: hard to recommend for most people, and worth a look mainly for a co-op group that can carry each other through the grind.