Games worth discovering

The Cub is Limbo meets Donkey Kong Country Returns, and it might be 2024’s first must-play indie

1K View2023-12-30

The Cub

8.9

Post-apocalypticDifficultCasualAdventureSingleplayerArcadeDystopianPuzzle

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SHOULD I PLAY THE CUB?

Hell yes, especially since there’s a free demo available now. The Cub is an action-packed 2D platformer set on a postapocalyptic Earth that looks set to be one of the first indie hits of 2024. While the full game won’t be available until January 19, 2024, you can play the demo for free now, and it’s already very impressive. The game’s gorgeous visuals and challenging gameplay were definitely enough to sell me, and I can’t wait to check out the full version.

TIME PLAYED

Completing the demo for The Cub took me around forty minutes. I jumped back in after I finished just to mess around and explore a little more. It’s impossible to say how long the full game will be based on this snippet, but I’d guess it will be on the shorter side. Thankfully, that seems just fine given the intensity of the gameplay.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT THE CUB?

• Stunning art and animation. I feel like I could have captured any given frame of gameplay during my time playing The Cub, and it would look like a screen grab from a really beautiful animated movie. Still images don’t really do it justice, though, so I implore you to check out the short gameplay video I shared at the top of this article. In motion, The Cub stands out from all but the absolute best-looking indie games. I was especially impressed by the main character’s smooth movement as he runs, jumps, and tumbles around this world. Just lovely.

• An intriguing ruined world. The Cub is set sometime long after Earth has succumbed to environmental collapse, but humans aren’t completely wiped out. In addition to the main character, a young boy who was raised by wolves, jumpsuit-wearing folks from Mars have landed and seem to be interested in capturing (or blowing up) our hero. I loved learning more about what happened during the end days through various newspapers, books, and radio broadcasts, and I’m looking forward to putting together more pieces in the full game.

• Immaculate vibes. Speaking of radio broadcasts, The Cub’s soundtrack is presented as in-game sound transmitted through an astronaut’s helmet that the main character has picked up. Through this clever setup, an in-universe radio DJ on Mars plays a bunch of absolute jams—from psychedelic rock to techno to some unsettlingly catchy tune that the DJ called “toddler pop.” The world of The Cub may be a dark mess, but the way it’s presented makes spending time here awfully fun.

• The perfect level of challenge. The Cub reminded me of Limbo in that almost everything in the world wanted me dead, and those deaths came quickly and often. However, instead of puzzle-solving, the gameplay is more focused on parkour-heavy platforming that reminded me more of the underappreciated 2010 game Donkey Kong Country Returns. Like that Retro Studios classic, The Cub often had elements in the background or foreground affecting my journey, such as a spaceman floating around on a jetpack and shooting net traps at me as I ran through one area.

While I died a fair few times even during this short demo, The Cub avoids frustration by having regular checkpoints and superfast reloads. More importantly, it never let me get bored because it was constantly introducing new elements—new challenges to overcome, new abilities I could use to progress, new twists on old encounters, and so on. If the game can keep that up for its full run time, then I’m going to have no hesitation in calling it a must-play.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN THE CUB?

• Some very minor platforming annoyances. Honestly, there’s very little I found fault with during The Cub’s demo. The one small complaint I’ll mention is that sometimes the main character grabbed onto a ledge when I jumped at it and sometimes he didn’t, and I couldn’t really tell you why that is. Still, with how fast-moving the game is, even when I failed, I didn’t feel like this issue set me back very much.