There have been some creative choices for video game protagonists over the years, but I can’t recall a time we’ve ever played as a rail-gun toting snail. Creativity and the spark of a novel idea, though, aren’t necessarily enough to stand out amongst the ever-widening indie market.
Clid the Snail is a twin-stick shooter set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, one where the smallest animals who survived this undisclosed calamity have built a new world from the ashes. This is a really interesting idea: in an industry awash with depictions of the earth after Armageddon, shifting the perspective to the tiniest of the planet's inhabitants felt refreshing. The first thing I noticed upon delving into the game's world was the attention to detail — even if the graphical fidelity wasn’t the greatest.
The landscape is a miniaturized version of what we’re familiar with in Fallout or the Metro series: a makeshift mesh of settlements scavenged from the materials of a long-gone era. From old electronics to the eerie discovery of giant human skeletons sunken into the ground beneath you, the game’s environmental design does a great job at instilling a sense of scale and perspective, both in a physical and more ethereal sense.
There isn’t exactly a lot of backstory to what happened, but the game’s core story is engaging in its own right. Clid has been banished from his own tribe following a disagreement with the elders, and the creatures he meets along the way and the ensuing narrative makes for an engaging, well-written piece.
But while setting and story meld nicely into what is a well-thought-out and admirable bit of world-building, the game falls short on account of its slow, methodical gameplay. This is a genre synonymous with speed and twitch reflexes, after all; Clid’s labored movement often isn’t enough to evade the waves of dumb, yet unrelenting mutated opponents, and while the roll function helps, you’ll undoubtedly wish for more gusto from our polyphylectic hero.
Twin-stick mechanics can offer some of the most satisfying control of any style of play, but Clid’s gameplay fails to instill the risk-reward features that make these types of games addictive. The problem is accentuated by boss battles, fights that pit you against a welcomed upgrade in A.I., but only serve as further frustration regarding the aformentioned sluggishness of movement. A reasonable effort has been put into what is a decently diverse arsenal, but it’s difficult to get excited about a new weapon or upgrade whilst being simultaneously dissatisfied with the core mechanics underpinning their use.
The game is a mostly linear affair with some welcome puzzles to break up the monotony of the shooting. These are always pretty simple and few and far between, but somehow seem to fit the pace better than the mostly combat-centric experience.
Clid the Snail’s six-hour romp through the miniaturized wasteland ultimately feels like an endeavor lost in translation. It impresses with its combination of a well-written story and interesting take on a trope done to death, but it feels at odds with itself as a twin-stick shooter. For a shooter, speed is everything. A painful irony for a snail, assuredly.
Linden Garcia,
Editor, NoobFeed
| Platform(s): | PC |
| Publisher(s): | Koch Media, Gamera Nest S.L. |
| Developer(s): | Weird Beluga Studio |
| Genres: | Action, Adventure |
| Themes: | Top-Down Shooter |
| Release Date: | 2021-12-15 |
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