The Cub Review

thesixthaxis.com:

In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Mowgli is left in the jungle as a child and taken in by a pack of wolves, raised as one of their own. Mowgli adapts to jungle life, able to survive its dangers and communicate with the animals that live within it, while other humans become alien to him. In The Cub, the boy is left on Earth following the Great Ecological Disaster and is raised by wolves, adapting to survive the dangers of a collapsed civilisation. The Cub wears its narrative influence on its sleeve, but adapts it enough to create a new story accompanied by great visuals and an engrossing soundtrack.

The Cub is a 2D platformer set in the ruins of the city of Alphaville and the overgrown wilds around it. It’s set a few years after the richest of the rich fled Earth on rockets to settle on Mars, leaving everyone else to deal with changes in the environment and ecological collapse. The majority of humanity did not survive, with Earth becoming a mass graveyard. The Cub is an orphan who has adapted not just mentally to the world, but physically, enabling him to handle the new atmosphere. He leads a generally peaceful life, until the humans, now known as Martians, return to assess Earth’s living conditions. The Martians are not able to survive long on Earth without suits, the planet having turned against those who fled it while the animals that stayed behind adapted. What starts as a research mission turns into a hunt, with The Cub as the target.

The gameplay experience consists of navigating levels, finding paths amongst the debris. There are an array of hazards in the environment from mutated animals, such as giant hedgehogs that can fire their spines to electrified plants, and high falls. The Boy is relatively fragile and contact with any hazard is instant death, but the checkpoint system is forgiving enough that you’re never sent too far back from where you died. There’s also a decent amount of variety in The Cub, with the game not just limited to running, and