Umbraclaw
The Summer of Demos - Day Twenty-Six
CW : This game is predicated on pet death and does feature descriptions of animal abuse.
What happens when an animal dies? In Umbraclaw, you journey through the Soulplane as a cat named Kuon to unlock the Boundary blocking the way back home, clashing claws with other animals on the way.
With only a dodge/dash and the ability to crawl in her arsenal, Kuon’s journey can be cut short in a single hit. Luckily, she has the ability to Anima Revive, adding the ability and soul of another animal to her skill set for the time being. If you use up all nine of her lives, you revive using a human’s soul, giving you a more humanoid form. In this form, you cannot fit in spaces that you can as a feline but do have a better chance of making it through fights. Be warned however - once lost, your feline nature is not so easily regained.
The game imparts these mechanics to you in frequent and lengthy lumps of narrated exposition, along with tutorials too long for their textboxes if you have them enabled. This is my biggest gripe with the game as presented in the demo - it won’t shut up and let me play. With every level designed to be traversable in the default cat form, the platforming tends to be a lot simpler than the extensive setup warrants. When you enter an area where another humanoid animal will be waiting to fight you for their soul at the end of it, the game stops for a good minute to explain exactly what the area is, exactly what hazards are there and that there is a “similar” presence out there. You go to two such areas in the demo and it does this each time.
I think of level 1-4 in Spelunky 2 when I see this exposition; when entering that level, a sentence of text pops up reading “You hear the beating of drums…” to establish everything you need before the upcoming battle against the caveman leader. A light environmental touch telling you about the importance around the upcoming foe and a detail fleshing out the world. Not ten screens of text telling you everything you could possibly know. Like Spelunky 2, Umbraclaw has a journal with entries about every type of enemy, area and pickup but still feels the need to front-load levels with as much lore as it can. The boss fights are also preceded with as much fully-voiced monologuing from the creature you’re about to fight, which really ruins the tension built up when you see them for the first time.
Outside of this burning problem, the game isn’t too bad. The thick black lined art is eye-catching and dimming memories Kuon has of their owner can be compelling. All the same, I played this demo on Switch and was unable to motivate myself to get through all of the exposition to take screenshots on a fresh file on PC. I doubt I will play the full game anytime soon.
In a word - overwritten.
Umbraclaw is a 2D action adventure developed and published by Inti Creates for PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4/5, XBox One and XBox Series consoles. All images used copyright of Inti Creates unless otherwise stated.
This article is part of the Summer of Demos series, where I’ll be releasing a Demo Diving preview article each day in July. If you liked this article, be sure to share it with a friend or enemy. If you back me on Patreon, you get access to articles one day before they release anywhere else. If we reach £25/month before the end of July, I’ll extend the Summer of Demos into August.