One of the best Demos I’ve played recently | Demo Review - The Cub
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✨Overview
The Cub is a story-rich puzzle-platformer game set in a post-apocalyptic Earth, where the majority of humans have abandoned the planet for Mars. Only a few remnants remain on the surface, coexisting mostly peacefully with the animals in order to survive. The game is set to release on January 2024, for PC, Xbox Series, PlayStation, and Switch. With a Demo available to try on Steam.
⭐️Demo Score: 10/10
📖Story and Premise
The game is set in the aftermath of the so-called Great Ecological Catastrophe, where the ultrarich escape to Mars, leaving the rest of humanity to perish. The protagonist, a small immune child known as The Cub — raised and cared for by wolves since he was a child, becomes the target of the returning Mars inhabitants.
🎨Visuals and Sound
The graphics are drawn and stylized to resemble classic animated films of the late '90s, such as Atlantis and Tarzan. As a result, the game also bears a resemblance to beloved classic platformer games for PS1, like Tarzan and Hercules. It successfully blends nostalgia with a touch of modernity, especially evident in its clean HD artwork. The overall art style is simply beautiful, along with its soundtrack which is mesmerizing, catchy, and memorable.
🎮Gameplay
The gameplay revolves around a simple yet effective platformer with straightforward jumping, swinging, and climbing mechanics. The controls are responsive and easy to grasp, allowing players to navigate the challenging environment without complexity. Although, there is a bit of unforgiveness as there’s no health system: one hit or one hazard, and you’re dead and back to the last checkpoint.
The game explores escape, exploration, and discovery through urban ruins, unraveling the mysteries of humanity's fall and immersing us in the world full of wonder, life, and death. Each level tells a story, presenting players with clues scattered throughout crumbling tower blocks, abandoned labs, irradiated mines, and overgrown war-torn urbanscapes.
The demo is so fire, playing through the roughly 20-minute experience, it hits all the right notes for me. From its atmospheric presentation and immersive world-building to the nostalgic platformer, It checks all the boxes for what I find interesting. The art style is superb. The world-building is immersive, blending my fascination with space exploration with the intriguing angle of humans as a spacefaring species facing ecological disaster.
🌍A truly immersive experience, from the narrative to the radio broadcasts
There are amazing radio broadcasts that the player will listen to via his scavenged astronaut helmet, and the radio broadcast here is done wonderfully — with kick-ass music and soothing DJ talk that I could actually listen to all day — and makes me feel like I’m really living in that world, and experiencing the adventure first hand, it really adds a lot to the immersiveness and atmosphere of the game. At first I thought that audio was bugging out, but the broadcast actually cuts off when you’re going underground, underwater, or going indoor — which was a surprisingly immersive touch.
⚖️Conclusion
The roughly 20-minute demo only showed a glimpse of the game's prowess, but I'm thoroughly impressed so far. This demo of The Cub is probably one of the best Demo’s I’ve played recently, and already has me sold on the game’s concept and idea. If you love a beautiful atmospheric platformer with a kick-ass soundtrack and immersive world-building, then The Cub is probably right up your alley, a 10/10 Demo experience.
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