The Cub

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales.)

(Note: This game is included in Golf Club Nostalgia & The Cub Bundle, along with Golf Club: Nostalgia AKA Golf Club Wasteland.)

The Cub is a Platformer that follows directly in the footsteps of developer Demagog Studio’s previous work, Golf Club Wasteland, later renamed Golf Club: Nostalgia. While The Cub departs from that game’s side-scrolling Golf gameplay, much of the rest of this game will be familiar to those who played Golf Club Wasteland – the game is still set in and around the post-apocalyptic ruins of the city of Alphaville (with familiar landmarks appearing here as well), there’s still plenty of biting satire, and this game continues the “Radio Nostalgia” soundtrack interspersing music with a soft-spoken radio deejay making announcements and playing sound clips of interviews with the various wealthy citizens who abandoned the decaying situation on Earth to make a life for themselves on Mars.

However, this time around players take the role of an unnamed feral child, the titular Cub, who has managed to survive in the hostile mutated animals and toxic conditions on Earth, evidently raised by wolves like Mowgli from The Jungle Book (one of many works of literature directly referenced here). However, The Cub’s lighthearted days exploring the ruins of humanity are interrupted when humans from Mars return to Earth, and upon discovering The Cub immediately try to hunt him down.

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Orinoco

One of the biggest differences that I feel differentiates The Cub from Golf Club Wasteland is tone – while Golf Club Wasteland was certainly not shy about skewering mankind’s hubris, the game’s overall tone seemed to be one of mourning for what was lost due to that hubris. The Cub, meanwhile, makes it clear that this hubris continues to extend into the post-apocalypse.

Mankind truly has learned nothing from its own downfall – upon discovering the Cub, the survey team does not for a single moment show concern for the child’s safety or wellbeing. On the contrary, their actions greatly endanger his life, and a few of them outright try to murder him. No, after the briefest of moments contemplating that studying the Cub might once again help humankind to thrive back on Earth, the researchers are mainly fixated on how this discovery could help their careers.

Radio Nostalgia also mirrors this change in tone. While a few of the songs here are morose, such as Son of No One, and there are a few lovely vocal lullabies, the majority of the soundtrack here seems to be upbeat percussion-centric and techno themes, such as a surprisingly catchy “Toddler Pop” song Asa Go Distant. All of this seems to indicate that after only the briefest period of mourning for presumably billions of lives lost on Earth, the surviving humans on Mars are all ready to move on, with the only lingering complaints seeming to be from interviews with survivors complaining about things like no longer being able to ride their motorcycle and having to be reminded not to try to open the windows in the Mars habitat to “let some fresh air in”.

Even the deejay has become a more ominous presence here, no longer just being a calming presence with occasional silly public service messages, but now clearly acting as a mouthpiece for the new government, spreading misinformation and implicitly threatening citizens who step out of line or even show any sign of sadness in public.

This is paired with some nice visuals that combine nicely-animated slightly-cartoony 2D visuals with a few very subtle 3D elements, along with some nice little bits of lighting, some good-looking water, and some atmospheric visual elements that look quite nice. While The Cub is not pushing any envelopes, it is a nice-looking game.

There is one element of the presentation I’m not quite as pleased with, and that is the narration by the Cub himself, who seems too well-spoken given his past, and whose juvenile antics don’t quite seem to fit in with much of the rest of the game’s tone.

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Phew Phew Arcade

As for the gameplay itself, what’s here is mostly fine Platformer fare, and there’s even a good bit of variety, but once again this is not going to be pushing any envelopes. In fact, in multiple ways, I found this game frustrating. The hit detection for platforms is often unclear, meaning that I repeatedly missed jumps I thought I was going to make, and even more often the game wouldn’t allow me to grab onto ledges despite that it seemed like I should be able to.

What’s worse, that variety I pointed to earlier often isn’t a good thing. One section of the game is a stealth section, but getting caught immediately forces a restart, and it’s often unclear where you can safely go without getting caught, resulting in more than a little trial-and-error. Another section involved gameplay a bit like a Shmup without the shooting (so… an Avoid-em-Up?), and movement here was loose, and once again the instant-fail states for messing up are frustrating. In fact, this was a constant throughout the game – messing up due to something that wasn’t the player’s fault and being jettisoned back to the last checkpoint over and over again.

The game’s publisher is saying The Cub is 4-6 hours long, but I completed it in under three hours despite the repeated deaths and restarts. There are also collectables strewn throughout the game, for those completionists out there. Overall, the $15 price tag on this game seems about right for what’s on offer here given the quality, though definitely don’t expect a long experience.

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Doomscrolling

In the end, much as with Golf Club Wasteland, I feel like The Cub’s strengths are in its social satire, not the gameplay itself. However, I also feel that as a satire, this game doesn’t seem to hit quite as hard as its predecessor, perhaps because associating the player with an innocent outsider to humanity’s self-destructive actions pushes players to disassociate with those actions – in other words, where the prior game was pointing the finger at our foibles, this game seems to point the finger at the foibles of those other people, if that makes any sense. In the end, it still works, but it feels somewhat blunted, despite being more vicious in its judgments.

At the same time, I do think the Platforming gameplay works better this time around, but there are still some aggravating problems here, from the unclear and spotty hit detection on platforms to the overall frustration caused by this game’s instant fail nature forcing players to have to repeatedly redo sections of gameplay. If you’re a Platformer fan, you have much better choices than this. However, if you fancy a Platforming experience with sharp satire, I think you’ll find The Cub has something strong to say here.

tl;dr – The Cub is a Platformer set in the same world as Golf Club Wasteland, taking place in the wake of that story and following a feral child surviving on a hostile post-apocalyptic Earth running from returning humans from Mars trying to hunt him down. The Platforming here is decent but has multiple baked-in frustrations, but the satire is excellent, albeit perhaps not quite as good as what we had in Golf Club Wasteland, and the game is relatively short. Still, overall this is a solid game with a powerful message, and worth a look if you enjoy good satire.

Grade: C+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Song – Asa Go Distant by Shane Berry & Igor Simic

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