A review of 1997 hit videogame Captain Claw

Heya! Recently, a friend of mine suggested i should play captain claw. After looking it up, i found out it’s apparently an action jump & run where you play as a pirate cat.

Pirate cats are the second most entertaining thing on this planet (right next to https://kamiscorner.xyz), so obviously, i had to play it.

First thing i noticed was the… interesting control scheme. Arrow keys to move, left control to attack and ‘1’ to shoot. This sure is an early pc game.

Honestly though, as weird as that sounds, it actually works pretty alright, so i didn’t bother rebinding any of the keys.

The second thing I noticed is that there’s voice acting - pretty decent voice acting at that! I didn’t really expect that from a 2d platformer released in 1997. They could’ve just not added voice acting, i doubt anyone’s buying captain claw for the plot. But they did, and it shows that someone cared. I think that’s what really struck me most about captain claw. Obviously, i can’t look into the minds of the people that made it, but this game just oozes with charm and personality, and there’s so many little things it does that really show that the people making this game cared about it as a piece of art, not just as a device for making money. Like how Nathaniel¹ quips at the player when you leave the game alone for too long.

“Don’t waste my time!” - Alright, geez. No need to be so rude about it, captain.

Or the looney-tunes like ‘Oooo, I’m about to fall’-Animation that plays whenever you’re standing on a ledge.

It’s just fun.

Another thing that makes it quite unique is the combat. You have the melee attack, obviously, where Captain Claw hits his enemies with a sword. It’s pretty short range so you’re probably going to get hit if you don’t know the enemies attack patttern. Then you have the regular old pistol which shoots bullets to take out enemies long-range. After that, you have the dynamite, which is what it says on the tin. Last but not least, my favorite weapon is the magic claw. Yes, Captain Claw can do magic for… some reason. I love the cheesy voiceline that plays when you activate it. All of the weapons are consumables though, so you can’t rely on them in every situation - You’ll run out eventually.

Still, I’ve never played a platformer where you have a ranged attack, let alone multiple, so It’s quite a fun change of pace.

MAGIC CLAW!

Only problem though… The game is really damn hard.

Like, I guess it comes with the territory of being an old pc game. Game were expensive, so when you bought one, you wanted it to last a while. Best way of making a game longer? Just pad the difficulty!

I can’t count the amount of times i died to instant death spike pits. Or instant death tar. Or instant death acid. And seeing as you only have six lives every stage, that means a lot of starting over.² The checkpoints themselves are placed quite generously and reviving doesn’t reset your progress, but that only helps so much considering you have to replay the whole stage anyways once you’re out of lives.

UPDATE: The dark forest broke me. I caved in and turned on infinite lives. Seriously, placing collectibles over an offscreen acid pit should be a crime or something.

Honestly, in the later stages it gets quite brutally difficult to the point where, even with infinite lives, I am struggling to clear the pirate grove. Mainly due to enemies and traps being placed in ways that make them nigh impossible to not get hit by without basically having memorized the whole stage. I just looked it up on the wiki, and apparently you can stun the Peg Leg Pirates³ by hitting them in their very inconspicuous peg legs. Im going to be honest here, I didn’t even notice they had them. Maybe the game originally came with a manual explaining that? Especially because there’s another pirate enemy type that also has a way more conspicuous peg leg that you can’t use to stun them.

I think part of the problem is that I set out to write a review of this game from the beginning. I usually don’t mind incredibly difficult games, even if they do border on being unfair. I chip at them away whenever I feel like playing them. For years now, whenever I felt bored, I’d try completing doom 2 without dying, for example. To this day, I haven’t managed it, but I don’t really care. Just having an excuse to play some doom every now and then when I feel like it is fun. I feel like Captain Claw will probably be that kind of game for me. Something I boot up once or twice every month and clear some levels in until I can beat them all without needing to resort to infinite lives. Having a sort of deadline for completing it in the form of wanting to get this review out diminishes that fun, I think. So yeah, I haven’t beat it. I got to the ninth level. I truly have achieved peak gaming journalism, I should send in an application to IGN, now that i think about it… I’m sure I’d fit right in.⁴

One thing I can say with certainty though, is that the bosses really are not all that great, mechanically. I’m only at stage 9 to be fair, but so far the stages the bosses were in were all far more difficult and interesting that the actual bossfights itself. I could just get by by wailing on the boss repeatedly and occassionally moving backwards when they were about to attack. I still got hit of course, but the bosses HP-Pool isn’t really much bigger than yours so they go down pretty easily as long as you can avoid taking damage once or twice and get a few more hits on them than they do on you. The only exception so far has been the boss of level 8, but the only change there was having to do a pretty basic platforming challenge anytime I wanted to get a hit in. One which didn’t really get any more difficult as the fight went on, mind you.

Would I recommend the game? Yes, absolutely. It’s incredibly charming and honestly really fun, even though the difficulty can get pretty bad. Just don’t set out to write a review on it like I did. I do definitely think it should’ve gotten more attention than it has. Maybe in a different timeline it could have replaced Rayman’s spot as ‘that really difficult platformer with great artwork’.⁵

It’s currently abandonware as far as I know, so you can just download it for free on the fan website “The Claw Recluse”. It’s well worth your time to try and at least play through the first stage, even if you can’t handle the difficulty of the later levels. It’s like, a couple megabytes, so it’ll only take about a minute to download, even if you have a terrible internet connection.

Footnotes

1. apparently that’s the main characters name, thank you wikipedia. ↩

2. And, come on guys. Six lives? Not nine? What a missed opportunity. ↩

3. I know, the name makes that pretty obvious, but I was only aware they were called that once I looked the enemies for the stage up online. ↩

4. Honestly though, IGN get bashed more than they deserve. There’s definitely been some stupid reviews they’ve made, but that’s just what happens when you’ve been around for long enough. ↩

5. To be fair, Captain Claw did release two years after the original Rayman, so… Maybe not. Still, Captain Claw deserves more attention. ↩