Clid The Snail

My first thought booting up Clid the Snail was that a small Madrid studio had built something that had absolutely no business being this confident in its world. The setting is a miniature post-human wasteland where insects and rodents have inherited the ruins, and the craft put into it is real: discarded lighters tower like monoliths, plastic straws jut from the soil like industrial pipes, and an old CD doubles as a conference table for a band of animal outcasts. Weird Beluga, a team born out of a PlayStation Talents contest, made this their debut, and the lore depth alone would embarrass studios three times their size. The game sits in an interesting, uncomfortable middle ground between twin-stick shooter and methodical tactical experience. Clid moves with genuine weight - not sluggishly by accident, but by design. His dodge roll burns stamina quickly, so you cannot simply roll-spam through encounters. Most of his early weapons are semi-automatic at best: a chargeable laser blaster sets the deliberate tone, and from there the arsenal wheel fills out with chain guns, flamethrowers, grenades, mines, and turret options. The shell upgrade system is where things get genuinely inventive - shells purchased with sap orbs from a hermit crab vendor can grant an ice boulder cyclone, cluster bomb bursts, or a temporary damage shield. On paper, the loadout variety is legitimately impressive. The puzzles scattered through each level are mostly switch-based, simple by design, but they pace the shooting well and stop the experience from collapsing into pure repetition. Where the goodwill erodes is in the combat tuning. The boss encounters in particular carry a difficulty spike that feels disconnected from the measured tone of the exploration sections - fights can stretch to grinding lengths, and without invincibility frames on the dodge roll the encounters shift from challenging to quietly punishing. Regular enemy encounters are forgiving enough, but the spongy slug forces paired with slow weapon fire creates moments where the game feels like it is fighting against the player rather than with them. Checkpoint placement around puzzles has also drawn complaints - failing a timed puzzle can eject you back to the start of an entire combat gauntlet rather than the puzzle itself. These are the friction points that pulled an otherwise compelling experience into middling critical territory, landing an average score of 63 across 27 critics on OpenCritic. And yet. The narrative thread - exile, found family, the Alastor outcast crew (a shy hedgehog, a shaman turtle, a mute bat, a ninja frog, a one-eyed chameleon) - carries genuine warmth. The voiced gibberish character chatter lands with real personality. The world is melancholy in a way that feels intentional, the humor dry and character-driven. Steam user reception sits at roughly 74% positive, which suggests a core audience that found the combat tempo rewarding rather than alienating. If you approach this less like an arcade shooter and more like a careful, story-adjacent crawl through a beautifully realized miniature world, the six-hour runtime lands with more grace than the review scores suggest.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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