At GDC 2025, I watched a walkthrough of one of the early levels of Possessor(s), the next game from Heart Machine. The studio typically goes for action games but mixes in a little bit of something else–2016’s Hyper Light Drifter had RPG elements, 2021’s Solar Ash was an adventure-platformer, and 2025’s Hyper Light Breaker is a cooperative roguelike. Possessor(s) is a metroidvania or, as Heart Machine prefers to call it, a search-action game (which, honestly, is such a better term for the genre).
A sidescroller, Possessor(s) sees you play as two characters: Luca, a teenage girl, and Rehm, the demon possessing her. I didn’t get to see the events that led to their partnership, but the Heart Machine team explained that the start of Possessor(s) sees Luca caught up in an interdimensional catastrophe that rips a hole in the sky and kills everyone she loves–it’s only because of the intervention of the strange horned man now within her that she survives.
Rehm also gives Luca artificial legs (I don’t know what happened to her original legs, but I assume the full game will clue us in), so that she can jump higher and survive falls from any height, and Luca uses these new prosthetics to navigate the now-quarantined city in hopes of escaping it and learning more about how the catastrophe happened. The duo regularly converse about their substantially different views of demons and the corporation responsible for most everything in the city, alleviating much of the sense of loneliness that I’ve come to expect in other search-action games.
Thanks to Rehm, Luca is able to hold her own in a world that wants to kill her. Combat is against the possessed objects and people of the city–demons far more feral than Rehm have corrupted all manner of things in the metropolis. I was surprised when a potted plant that had been pretending to be totally inanimate and harmless sprung to life right as Luca walked past it, and the devs said that plenty of demons will adopt that strategy of hiding in plain sight by pretending to be seemingly normal parts of the world. When a fight does break out, mechanically, it looks a whole lot like playing Super Smash Bros., with an emphasis on combos and air juggles. It looks more engaging than Hyper Light Breaker, but I didn’t get hands-on time with Possessor(s) so I can’t say one way or the other for sure.
Like its genre contemporaries, Luca unlocks additional abilities over time, which open up new options in combat and open up new areas of the map. I didn’t get a chance to see this in action, but it sounds like it works just like how upgrades are handled in the likes of Hollow Knight, Nine Sols, Super Metroid, and other similar games, with an open-ended, interconnected world that allows players to explore in whichever direction they have access to.
Stylistically, Possessor(s) is the biggest departure from Hyper Light Drifter’s visuals–not bad by any means, but surprising all the same since every subsequent game from the studio has followed that art direction pretty closely. The colors are certainly similar, but Possessor(s)’s characters look hand-drawn, and bolder lines and flashier colors for the animations make attacks and movements appear like something from a comic book or manga. It’s very cool, and at least in terms of art direction, Possessor(s) is my favorite of Heart Machine’s games. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting, but the game intrigues me all the same, and I can’t wait to jump into it myself later this year.
Possessor(s) is set to launch for PS5 and PC sometime in 2025.
