Excellent Metroidvania with rough edges
Possessor(s) is a Metroidvania in a post-apocalyptic setting. A teenager and an extraterrestrial lifeform travel through the ruins of a corporate city to return the latter home. Despite the jank, it is a fantastic game with satisfying exploration, enjoyable combat, diverse and challenging bosses, and a touching story. The content warnings are below.
There are numerous bosses with varied movesets. The main ones are impossible to miss, while the optional require looking for them (or taking a side quest which marks the locations).
The combat is enjoyable, with several main and secondary weapons, and each of them can have up to 3 passive abilities (Affixes) installed, allowing to customise one's build and playstyle. The Affixes can be found or purchased from the merchants scattered throughout the map. The variety of the regular enemies is decent - while some might look similar, their attacks and behaviours defer from one another.
There are also linear upgrades for the health, healing, and secondary weapon charges. The unusual aspect is that after finding several of them, the health and the healing charge ones need to be traded for the actual upgrade from one of the merchants.
The exploration is satisfying and every divergence from the main path can bring something of value, be it an upgrade, a quest item, or a shortcut.
The keyboard and mouse controls are rebindable and generally comfortable, though the menu controls cannot be changed or bound to the keyboard, i.e. the map and the inventory management use mouse when nothing else does.
The game saves at the checkpoints and upon dying (there are occasional autosaves) into one of 3 save slots, so one has to use the OS file management system to create manual saves. As typical for Souls-likes, the items found and the map explored are kept, while the currency is left at the place of death to be retrieved. A small thing I found amusing is the loading screen with the demonic companion dragging the avatar back to the checkpoint. Also, the currency, chroma, can be deposited and withdrawn at the checkpoints, so the only amount at risk is what was found between them.
In terms of performance, I added the -dx11 launch option, so whatever junk UE5 introduced, the DX version culled most of it. The performance was stable and there have been no crashes in my 20 hour-long playthrough.
As for the story, the protagonist and the NPC companion are fairly relatable (as far as a teenager from a disadvantaged background released from the social pressure to conform and a guy with PTSD can be). While starting at a somewhat antagonistic note due to their different goals and general attitudes, the shared values and experiences lead to friendship. There are some choices in the main story and whichever is made, they are discussed (automatically, the player cannot express their reasoning).
Content warnings (available in-game)
The game contains flashing lights. It also contains depictions of emotional abuse, torture, and harm to animals, and may not be appropriate for all audiences.
The topic of abuse, whether against humanoid beings or animals (for "research"), is integral to the story, and at one point the player may have to kill a non-hostile fox (at the Inverted Plaza, the fox spawns within the arena; it is possible to have the hostile demon to kill them). From my knowledge, humans tend to torture (including forced impregnation) beagles, bunnies, and mice (as they have the least ability to defend themselves) for kicks, and pigs to murder them and consume their corpses, so the lore does not explain why the mini-pigs were used. If the topic is upsetting, reaching out to the local animal rights organisations and stopping the animal abuse in the offline world would be the most reasonable course of action, rather than skipping the game.
The visual style is beautiful, expressive, and fits the game well. The character sprites are 2D and the dialogue portraits for the main characters and antagonists have a lot of unique expressions (the side NPCs have less), while the environment is 3D. It sometimes makes the navigation harder, as the climbable walls blur with the background.
As for the jank, the other side quests, despite their relevance for the story, require to gather a lot (8-12) of collectibles which have no use outside of these quests, are not marked on the map, and the map itself is fairly unhelpful - while the rooms are approximately marked, along with some unexplored or locked paths and save points, the discovered but not collected items are not and there are many of them. On the other hand, the merchants with emptied inventories remain on the map (thus, purchasing everything before moving on is strongly recommended). However, should one so desire, it is possible to check the save file and cross-reference the found items with a guide. I would like to explicitly point out that the above leads to quite a lot of backtracking and the fast travel points can be far apart. I have not got the Endless Lobsters achievement and have no intention of doing, as the things are not marked, in hard to reach places, and serve no other function than to troll completionists (as far as I am aware). In addition to that, as mentioned, the currency can be stored, so it has to be withdrawn before going to a merchant, which can get annoying.
Regarding the more technical aspects, some techniques are not tutorialised (e.g. down-dashing on the branches), while others are. Some settings are not accessible in-game, but visible in the configuration file (e.g. reflections). I got softlocked and had to reload a few times. The whip has a somewhat odd collision box and can miss the grappling point if used too close or while moving, despite the targeting being decent overall.
Finally, some story threads are purposefully left more open-ended, so one can draw their own conclusions.