Necro Pop brings spooky arcadevania action to Neo Geo in 2026

There are easier ways to make a video game in 2026 than building one for the Neo Geo. You could release a roguelike on Steam. You could make a farming sim with emotionally unavailable villagers. You could put “cozy” in the title and watch wishlists appear out of thin air. But no. Nalua Studio has chosen chaos — beautiful, cartridge-shaped chaos — by making Necro Pop, a brand-new action platformer designed for SNK’s legendary Neo Geo hardware. And somehow, it looks like the little undead troublemaker might be worth waking the crypt for. At the centre of Necro Pop is Poppi, a Soul Keeper from the Land of the Dead. Now, before you picture something bleak, miserable, and full of men whispering in Latin, hold on. This afterlife has more personality than that. Poppi’s world is colourful, strange, and packed with lost souls who seem less “eternally damned” and more “waiting for someone to turn the lights back on.”

Unfortunately, trouble arrives in the form of The Gloam, a spreading darkness that is corrupting souls and generally behaving like the sort of supernatural mess you do not want on your weekend. Poppi heads into the Land of the Living to sort things out, because apparently even in death, someone still has to do all the work. The developers are calling Necro Pop an Arcadevania, which is a nice way of saying: “Yes, there is exploration, but no, you probably will not need a corkboard, red string, and three browser tabs to understand the map.” The game promises action-platforming, upgrades, hidden areas, boss fights, and collectible souls scattered across five zones. That mix is important. The Neo Geo was never exactly short on swagger, but it is mostly remembered for fighters, shooters, and arcade bruisers that looked at your spare change and said, “I live here now.” A compact exploratory platformer feels like a refreshing detour — less “quarter-munching tournament machine,” more “Saturday afternoon adventure with ghosts.”

Visually, Necro Pop has that immediate Neo Geo appeal: big sprites, thick colours, expressive animation, and enough spooky-cute energy to make Halloween jealous. Poppi herself looks like the mascot of a 1994 arcade game that somehow got lost in a haunted laundromat and came back thirty years later with better lighting. She is charming, slightly eerie, and exactly the kind of character who looks like she could save the world, steal your snacks, and pretend she never saw them. Of course, because this is Neo Geo, there is also the matter of the physical release. The AES version is not exactly priced like an impulse buy at the supermarket. This is collector territory — the land of premium boxes, numbered editions, manuals, inserts, soundtrack discs, and people saying “mint condition” with the seriousness of a medical diagnosis. For some players, that will sound ridiculous. For Neo Geo collectors, it will sound like Tuesday.

But what makes Necro Pop genuinely interesting is that it is not just a museum piece. Yes, the cartridge release is the headline-grabber. Yes, the idea of a new Neo Geo game in 2026 has the same energy as finding out your grandfather secretly joined a punk band. But Necro Pop is also planned for modern platforms, meaning it has to stand as an actual game, not just a shiny object for people with reinforced display shelves. That is where the pressure comes in. A new retro-hardware game can get attention for existing. It gets praised for the audacity, the craftsmanship, the novelty. But eventually, someone has to press start. The jumps need to feel good. The combat needs to have bite. The upgrades need to matter. The secrets need to be more satisfying than finding a single coin behind a suspicious wall. We have all been hurt before. Still, there is reason to be optimistic. Nalua Studio has shown interest in building modern-feeling games within old-school boundaries, and Necro Pop seems to understand the assignment: be nostalgic, but do not act like 1996 was perfect. Because let’s be honest, 1996 also gave us loading screens, passwords, and the kind of difficulty spikes that made children develop trust issues.

What Necro Pop appears to offer is something warmer: a colourful, characterful action adventure with one foot in the arcade and the other in the grave. It is spooky without being grim, retro without being dusty, and cute without looking like it was focus-tested by a committee of plush toy executives. In a market overflowing with pixel-art throwbacks, Necro Pop has a pretty strong claim to authenticity. It is not merely pretending to be an old arcade game. It is being built for the kind of hardware that once ruled arcade floors with absurd confidence and very expensive cartridges. The Neo Geo may be long past its commercial prime, but projects like this prove it is not done haunting us yet. And honestly? If the afterlife looks this good, maybe we should let it.

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