Umbraclaw Logo
Umbraclaw Icon
Umbraclaw

Developer: Inti Creates

Action
Challenging
Weird
  • Price: $24.99
  • Release Date: May 30, 2024
  • Number of Players: 1
  • Last on Sale: -
  • Lowest Historic Price: -
  • ESRB Rating: T [Teen]
Videos
Reviews:
  • Watch this review on YouTube
    It has a unique take on the Metroidvania genre, giving you options on how you tackle it, but it comes up feeling odd

    One of the things that more independently-geared developers can be counted on, is to try to come up with new takes to inject some fresh feels into familiar genres. Of course, part of the reason many games are developed with following well-trod paths in mind is that taking risks doesn’t always pan out the way you hoped. I feel like that’s what has happened with Umbraclaw, a title that plays with the traditional Metroidvania flavor by giving you new abilities in an odd way, and with a cost depending on your goals for your runthrough.

    Among the unusual things in the game, you’ll start out as a pretty ordinary housecat, absolutely an odd choice for a protagonist facing down many stages of enemies. Trapped in the Soulplane after an untimely death, you’re determined to reunite with your owner, who is a loving young girl. The challenge is that getting back to the world of the living won’t be easy, and there are many obstacles in front of you. The good news is that you’ve got 9 lives to help you accomplish this, the news that’s somewhere between bad and at least odd, is that every time you die you’ll take on new abilities that make survival easier. But that will continue to pull you further away from your original pure form in the process.

    In your cat form your focus will need to be more on evasion and using your dash effectively to stay out of trouble as much as possible. Each new death will add what appears to be a random ability, typically giving you at least a little bit of offensive oomph to work with, but in this cat form you’ll remain pretty fragile, suffering one-hit deaths pretty easily. Once you get to a certain point, your soul will then evolve into being more humanoid, and at that point the game takes on a far more traditional Metroidvania feel. But now you’ll have lost the ability to crawl through small places, and it will ultimately change the nature of your reunion if you’re able to persist until the end.

    While I absolutely have to give the developers behind this credit for doing something very different, I do wish that it were executed a bit more cleanly. I understand that the nature of the game is to make it feel different every time, but the randomness of the order you get abilities and what feels like a lack of polish in many of them can make the experience more frustrating than thrilling. Throughout you just feel so fragile, and given the oddities of some combinations of powers, and how they feel, it makes it very difficult to settle into a rhythm and reliability of you knowing your range and even just how to move effectively through challenging spots. The game is absolutely creative, but in the end it also feels quite sloppy and unrefined. While it could possibly be that I’m just not in tune with the intent of its design, I’ll stick to the thought that if they’d spent more time and care making your abilities feel viable and sensible in a variety of combinations, the experience could have been a better one. Whether or not it’s a good fit for you will depend on how patient you’re willing to be with ideas that don’t quite feel ready for prime time.


    Justin Nation, Score:
    Good [7.3]
2024

Nindie Spotlight

. All rights reserved