izigame.me

This is going to sound harsh, and well... it is. This is by far the worst Limbo / Inside / Planet of Lana-esque game I've ever played. It basically fails on every note it tries to hit:

Graphics - these look great, in screenshots. The thing is, in-game, they're still INCREDIBLY flat. This makes it difficult, if not impossible in some sections, to tell what is a physical thing that will kill you in the foreground vs. the background. It leads to just trial-and-error for the whole game

Gameplay - oof. It's bad. I'm not sure if they wanted to make it a more ambitious, dynamic platformer and couldn't pull it off, or they wanted to make a much more streamlined simple platformer but decided to complicate it by making it a horrid mess. You can jump and literally see your sprite pass right through grabs and fall to your death. You can get wildly different results from identical button presses. Grabbing points and hitboxes are basically random. It's some of the worst platforming I've ever experienced, and I'm played those old 16-bit-era games this one mentions as inspirations. So many of your deaths are just not your fault the first time through.

On top of that, checkpoints are sometimes a minute+ behind you, especially in glorified autoscroller sections (one could argue 95% of the game is, but the even more autoscrollery-autoscroller points), so you just wait through the little animated death scene for the 200th time and then do the exact same 1 minute segment you just did but now you know there's a "gatcha" from offscreen. Repeat until they decide the section is done.

Sound - I get what they were going for with the music and the radio and it is like, close to getting it, but it's all just... off. Outside of one or two parts. That could be because it feels like the audio is designed to play at certain points as if you're making flawless progress, but it just plays no matter how much getting knocked back you do, so a lot of the dramatic moments just have nothing or something random playing. In a more streamlined game this would have worked a lot better.

Collectibles - these are just insulting. Literally 95% of the "collectibles" are just right on your path, but the other 5% you have to find, through jumping off ledges and replaying levels, what weird little spot you have to go into. It just feels so utterly pointless to have so few off the path at all, yet they're naratively the same weight as the ones tossed at your face. Speaking of narrative

Story / Lore - I actually am pro a lot of what the statement of this game is. Giant tech companies are bad for us, the rich people leading them are among the worst of humanity, and capitalism is probably the eventual death of us all. But this game talks about it in such an immature, lazy way it makes me embarrassed to agree with it. It's got every trope in the world and somehow makes them worse than most other games. It's just bad. It's what a techbro would write if a techbro was anti-techbro. If you asked an AI to write you a story about kids left behind on earth it would be about as soulless. It references works of art and literature without apparently any emotion that should be involved in that.

I didn't really enjoy Somerville but I'd rather replay that whole thing than try to finish off the achievements here, it at least had feeling behind it. Even if I hated the stealth sections so much (puzzle 2d platformers need to stop pretending stealth is an interesting puzzle, it's not), I appreciated the rest of the game. Here I just can't find anything to commend. The closest I can say is, at points, you can see glimpses of what it could have been, but it's just a hot mess instead.

The Cub is the sequel to Demagog stuido's Golf Club Nostalgia, and is just as interesting and enjoyable. Taking place concurrently with the events of GCN, The Cub is billed as a "parkour game", which frankly I find to be a little bit generous, as there is a bit of stiffness to the controls. The Cub is a cinematic platformer with very deliberate movement and one hit deaths, similar to games like Limbo and Inside. It has gorgeous 2D graphics that legitimately look like a hand drawn cartoon. Much like GCN, your character has a helmet and throughout the game is listening to Radio Nostalgia from Mars, and the station is still entertaining and fascinating and very well done, however, because of who you are controlling in this game, it changes the context of things and makes it feel a little more sinister. You only got a taste of the ruined earth environments in Golf Club Nostalgia, the Cub has you experiencing them much more fully, exploring fields and buildings and sewers, while trying to avoid those who would capture you and do you harm. It is also much more interesting and exciting in terms of gameplay, as the simple golf in GCN was just an excuse to tour the world and its environments, but the platforming in The Cub is much more visceral and entertaining. The story was well told and it was good to find out what happens to our pilot friend and the little boy from Golf Club Nostalgia. If there is a negative to the game, it is that it is extremely short, I finished it with about 85% of the collectibles in about two and a half hours. I look forward to playing Highwater, the third game in the trilogy.

9/10

Quick rating: 6.5
Longer review:
The Cub continues the world building from Golf Club Nostalgia, a game I enjoyed a lot (apart from the Iron Will achievement). The Cub is also a LIMBO-like... a genre I greatly enjoy. As such, I was very hyped for this game. And, it's not bad. But far from great.
The Good: Art is really nice, the radio station is great, the story is enjoyable. Gameplay is ok.
The Not As Good: This game has tags of Puzzle, Precision Platformer, and Puzzle Platformer... and I'd say it's none of these. It is a platformer. But it has 0 puzzles in it whatsoever. And it's not what I'd consider a precision platformer... although some sections are a little challenging, mostly because the game can play a bit jank, not because it's really designed to be precision.
The game is short. I got all achievements + all in-game items for 100% in under 3 hours. And that includes nearly an hour spent on doing Chapter 1 deathless... for those not achievement hunting, you may finish this game under 2 hours (or just a little over).
At times, the foreground art can get in the way of visibility. And ledge grabbing is fairly inconsistent on whether it'll work or not.
All in all, the game is not bad. I give it a recommendation, but not a glowing one. If you like run-right chase sequences with a nice world and interesting story/music... this will be a pleasant time for you. A bit like the game Little Orpheus. If that doesn't sound like your type of game... then I'd avoid or pick up on a steep sale.