Thanks to Inti Creates for the review code

Title: Umbraclaw
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $24.99
Release Date: 05/30/2024

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Story

In this action adventure game, you take control of Kuon, a cat who died and was sent to the hellish afterlife known as The Soulplane.

Using the powers of various animals, it is up to Kuon to make it back to her owner in the human world while resisting the urge to become corrupted into a humanoid herself…

Presentation

Breaking from the pixel art look of most 2D Inti games, Umbraclaw gives an outstanding first impression by providing us with one of the most unique artstyles in a long while. Everything looks like a gorgeous painting, animating beautifully with stylized visuals and plenty of weird character designs for the hellish world you traverse, and each area the game throws at you manages to still look stunning despite the fact that you’re literally in the afterlife.

If I had to compare the look of Umbraclaw with something specific, I’d describe it as a stained glass painting come to life, and everything looks and runs smooth as butter here on the Steam Deck. It looks gorgeous on the go, (if a bit of a battery drainer on default settings) and just as stunning when hooked up to a HDTV, even if you downscale it to 1080P!

There’s also a wonderful soundtrack, although several songs do carry over between multiple stages. Gone are the chiptunes, and in are some beautiful instrumental tracks that really fit the theme of determination. While not every song was a particular favorite of mine, several of them are just as worthy as purchasing the soundtrack over as the songs in the Blaster Master Zero series. Add in full voice acting for the dialogue scenes in both english and japanese, (and adorable cat noises) and you have yourselves a game with a near perfect presentation!

Gameplay

Umbraclaw is a stage-by-stage platformer, taking place in the Soulplane as Kuon must master his Shadowpass technique to survive to the end of each of the areas, get a piece of the boundary, and then open it in order to go back home. Initially, Umbraclaw seems a lot like a metroidvania, and after the tutorial you are thrown into a map with four directions to explore however you please; the first four bosses can be done in any order you want! But honestly, the game doesn’t encourage exploration all that much, and in the second chapter, you go to four more stages without traveling on a connected map, pretty much making each stage their own self-contained entity, and the world that connects the first four levels their own separate thing.

That doesn’t mean you can’t find some goodies looking around. Right away you’ll likely run into an enemy, which will trigger Kuon’s Anima Revive, bringing him back to life with one of his nine lives, while gaining a new ability derived from an animal soul. These wildly vary, and usually depend on the enemy or obstacle you hit, so as one example you may get an ability that stops time to make you freeze fountains of lava, right after you hit a fountain of lava. Thus, you can use that technique to continue throughout the stage and help get to the boss. Or you could hit an enemy that gives you an automatic dodge technique that uses some of your spirit meter to avoid taking damage, which is a godsend for dealing with the later bosses.

However, as much as it may seem like you could just use up eight of your nine lives and become a dodging machine on your last one, there’s a huge catch in the Soulplane, as around the fifth soul or so Kuon will begin to transform into a human-like beast form that does a crazy amount of damage and gains more melee potential, but will lose the memories of her former owner and get corrupted. You can resist this by mashing the B button during the transformation, but doing so will deplete your Hope Points, a very limited resource that’s mainly used for upgrading Kuon’s skills with Magatama gems you come across. Thus, if you run out of soul points, you have no choice but to transform into that stronger beast. Get to your ninth life, and you become an even stronger beast, and after that point it’s game over unless you’re on the Anima mode that just revives you infinitely.

The Beast/Cat transformation is honestly a cool mechanic, since it shows how well the levels are made to account for both playstyles. See, every level can be completed as normal cat Kuon without taking a single hit, with only his Shadowpass dash technique. How could a cat beat her enemy without fighting it, you might ask? Well, you just dash through the attacks of bosses to build up a spirit meter, and when the meter gets maxed out you can perform a powerful drop to obliterate an entire health bar!

This makes dueling bosses as both the Cat and the Humanoid rather interesting, as while you could just play a stage like a typical action game with the humanoid, playing as the cat form makes it a matter of precise dodging and countering, which I found to be incredibly satisfying, especially if you manage to beat the whole stage without transforming. Luckily if you end up messing up or get carried away, you can sacrifice all your souls to go back to a normal cat at the end of chapter 1 stages, but at the end of chapter 2 stages, you have to also sacrifice hope points when doing this, which makes upgrading your skills pretty tough from that point if you want to avoid the corruption.

Still, a four stage to four stage structure, kinda like Megaman with a little bit of exploration here and there should be a fun time. And for the first good chunk of Umbraclaw, I loved doing my best to survive stages without transforming. Several I pulled off without a hitch, and felt immense satisfaction from getting better and better at the game the further I got into it, eager to see what would come next and how it would all end.

Then when you hit the final chapter, well… I can’t talk about this next point without spoiling some mechanics and how the endings work. There are no direct story spoilers below, and no images in this review are from the final chapter. But I am still putting this spoiler warning here because to be quite frank, the way the endings work in Umbraclaw is so infuriating to the point it heavily soured what could have been one of my favorite game experiences in quite some time. How could such a final chapter do that to a game? How could the final act drag down the entire experience for me?

By making the last chapter into a frustrating gauntlet that rips off the handles and wheels without warning. See, the final chapter starts with a pretty tough fight, and then immediately afterwards, a very long final stage. There is no turning back, and no backtracking to the world of the first four stages to explore like you could choose to do in Chapters 1 and 2. You also cannot just transform back into a normal cat after starting this final chapter, as you’re locked in the transformation you had at the end of that boss fight. Once you trigger that boss fight, you must hold onto your nine lives throughout the entire end of the game.

Sounds like a fun challenge of mastery, right? Well, considering how the game is just starting to pick up and you’re supposed to be getting the hang of things by the end of Chapter 2, to say it felt like the game ended a bit too quickly would be an understatement. All of a sudden, you’re rushed into a gauntlet, one that’ll put your skills to the limit. I did the boss without a hitch and was eager to take on the final area with confidence. (it also autosaves after that boss, so I hope you didn’t turn into a beast during the battle or are on the easiest mode!) Well, welcome to pain! Some of the toughest, nastiest platforming challenges imaginable are thrown at you, and if you manage to survive all of them, you have a miniboss rush to fight!

The second set of stages introduce mini bosses, and while they’re tough enough to fight in their own levels, having to fight all four back to back is immensely difficult, especially since at this point in a playthrough, you already fought them around a half hour ago. This is just bad padding for the sake of it, and makes things tougher without providing a true way to test your skills like the platforming challenges, (which while frustrating, still feels rewarding to conquer as intended) and then after that you have the final boss.

Fully dying here in a normal or hard difficulty will send you back quite a bit, but even on easy, trying to get here without transforming is a real pain, and remember, you cannot revert back in this final chapter. You have to do this full long gauntlet of SIX BOSSES without dying nine times. To say this is a difficulty spike would be way understating it; it just goes from feeling like the middle of a game just about to ramp up, to suddenly rushing in the final act because there’s no time left. What ends up as a three chapter game, felt like there should have be four.

But oh, what happens if you beat the final boss? Well, to avoid story spoilers, you’ll get an ending based on actions you take during the adventure, including staying in cat mode during the final area. Considering the absurdly long gauntlet you have to conquer just to reach the final boss, let alone beat it, you’ll probably mess up badly your first time. But surely even a bad ending may have something to it that’s at least amusing or horrifying or ponder-worthy, right, and you can just try again?

For the bad ending I got, it felt abrupt, outta nowhere, done with little explanation or any buildup indicating that outcome could remotely happen or what caused said outcome, and then the game just kicks you back to the title screen.

Then when I started my game again, I was at the very beginning of the game. A New Game Plus was forced upon me, and while I still had my bestiary, upgrades and gems/hope points, everything else was back to zero. Not even an attempt to restart the final chapter from the beginning to try and do it as a cat to opt out of the New Game Plus. (Worth noting, you can go into the save file select screen and copy your save to another slot, but I had no idea this was coming or else I would have before that final chapter started!) All the story cutscenes still played as normal, and all the flashbacks I found again were the same, meaning I had to skip cutscenes nonstop due to just having seen them in the past three hours of play, and I still had to beat the main stages and everything else all over again. Except I had some upgrades to make the first part a bit faster, yay…?

Yeah, no. If your game forcefully erases and restarts your save file upon beating the final boss because it gave you a bad ending and doesn’t even let you attempt or inform you on the conditions of the ending you obtained, and your bad ending is so brief and ridiculous that it makes you feel like the entire game you played was a complete waste of time, then I am sorry, but that is just not at all the right way to handle a New Game Plus in the slightest; yes, in order to get all the endings of Umbraclaw, you have to beat the entire game multiple times. Yes, some stuff in the story can change based on the player’s actions, and I found a cool alternate thing on my second playthrough upon reading a bestiary entry for a boss that gave me a hint on beating it another way, and staying in cat form as long as possible is the key to victory and the more you upgrade, the easier it is.

But at that point, it just becomes a bunch of loops of upgrading and grinding and playing the same stages over and over and over again. And I felt like I wasted my time after that first run, and quickly dropped it midway through my second as it started getting immensely repetitive. Just utterly crushed and a bit enraged, honestly! Even if I restarted the game with every single skill unlocked and being able to feel invincible, that still doesn’t excuse the fact I have to spend another 2-3 hours repeating the same stuff with barely any changes just to get another shot at a better ending. Madness.

Conclusion

I desperately wanted to like Umbraclaw more than I did. It was the next game from the director behind my beloved Blaster Master Zero trilogy. It has a great theme of finding hope in the afterlife. It’s an outright gorgeous experience with beautiful music. It rewards using clever evasion versus rushing straight into everything. It has varying difficulty levels that should have been able to satisfy players of all kinds. The bosses and levels start off great with plenty of creativity.

But good lord, it’s been quite a long while since beating a game enraged me so much, and how Umbraclaw handles endings and its new game plus is infuriating. What should have been a slow ease into mastering the mechanics so you can do that final chapter flawlessly, ended up being a game that dooms you without you realizing it. Yes, repeat playthroughs help you to unlock all the skills and upgrades, which makes those better endings easier to pull off. No, that still doesn’t mean that I had fun having to replay a 3 hour game all over again just to get a different ending, especially considering the difficulty spike in the final chapter is enough to ruin your entire playthrough’s outcome, and feels like it goes from a smooth increase of challenge to a sudden mountain of difficulty in your way.

Now if the extra playthroughs had more variety to them, or changed the dialogue up a bit to acknowledge the misery of repeating a game over and over, or really did anything besides force you to repeat the same stuff you’d just witnessed in a very short game, I would have had way more fun going back and trying different boss orders and finding extra stuff I missed.

Reaching the boss fights as an ordinary feline and using the shadowpass properly to beat them was immensely satisfying. Getting a random ability upon death was a weird gamble, but one that led to a lot of different possibilities throughout each stage. The upgrade system rewards saving those hope points and avoiding deaths that eventually require you to spend them all to become normal again. Alas, pulling an incredibly frustrating middle finger to the player at the very end soured the entire experience for me.

Still, Umbraclaw is a gorgeous experience that’s great to control, but not one you’re going to figure out a satisfying ending to without a lot of patience and repetitive playthroughs, and a game that really should have just been allowed to be a short fun game without needing to force artificial padding with repeat plays. You might just honestly need to wait for a guide to come out to just get a good ending the first time around, and I cannot believe I have to even recommend such a thing in the year 2024, but that penalty for the new game plus is just that awful to deal with. You’ll thank me later for saving you the frustration of working all that way only to get bricked into a bad ending and having to start all over again.

I give Umbraclaw a 5 out of 10.