Captain Claw - A Retrospective

Sit down mateys and let me tell you the tale of one of my favorite games that I never finished, the pirate adventure 2D gorgeously animated sidescroller which is unimaginable to me how anybody would be able to play it without cheat codes, Captain Claw!

I have never heard of Captain Claw growing up and you probably haven´t either, that is until I bought that fateful issue of the gaming magazine with an included CD for children, KyberMyš (CyberMouse in heathen speak).

The magazine usually included an older or obscure shovelwarey game on its included CD with occasional gems like the one I am training to tell you about despite myself.

I have been fond of 2D platformers before putting this particular disc into the CD drive of our family PC, having grown up with Prehistorik 2 and Prince of Persia that were installed on the DOS computers in my school. When I turned on this one though, I was blown away.

First of all, Captain Claw is a feast for the senses. It has a loose story that takes you throughout the levels, but it is not that important, except for the gorgeously animated cutscenes that play at the end of every other level. They must´ve been even more impressive when the game came out, since DVD was still a fresh new thing!

Then there is the impeccable sound design. Every weapon and powerup has their own jingle, enemies will yell at you and die screaming and the environment feels alive. The art is fantastic, depicting classic places of pulpy adventures, like a dungeon (the one where you lock people up), a port full of ships, underwater caverns or a forest full of perilous pits. Captain Claw himself feels incredibly responsive with great animations for both his movements and his attacks. Those include not only sword attacks, but also shooting his pistol, throwing dynamite or picking up barrels or enemies and tossing them away!

The game has an incredible amount of collectibles, and yet it isn´t a collectathon. There are lots of different kinds of treasure that you can collect along the way which counts towards your high score as well as extra lives (and oh boy, do those come in handy) and magic powerups for your sword! Then there is invisibility and the mouse, which grants the high jump. That is a critical powerup that is timed and is often required for Claw to reach secret areas, which the game has heaps of.

The level design is excellent as well. Each level is expansive and usually features multiple ways which can be taken through. There are many nooks and crannies outside the main road that encourage exploration, and the rewards for it feel satisfying. For what better thing could one find at the end of a fork in the road than a gold plated skull with giant rubies instead of eyes!

Captain Claw is also exceedingly difficult. It uses both a health and life system with sparse checkpoints throughout any given level. Your health will be steadily chipped away by enemy attacks and various projectiles and over the course of the game the amount of instant death bottomless pits becomes more and more common. And when ones total life count drops to zero, it is all the way to the start or to a previous save.

And the game knows it. It does have a number of cheats from which I have used the God Mode, which gives you unlimited health, lives and consumables, and the high jump cheat (if I still remember correctly, its MPJORDAN, which is just objectively funny). However, using cheats disables checkpoints, which means you need to complete a whole level before in one go each time. And even cheats do not make the game a walk in the park, since there is no cheat that keeps you from falling to your death.

I have only ever made it to the final environment of the Lava Temple on Tiger Island, but have never finished the game. There is one section that I remember of being a gamer moment for which I am proud of myself for beating it.

It can be found in the environment of the lost ruins, and it is a particularly difficult spin on a platformer classic - the disappearing platform.

But, in this case, there is not only one, but what feels like a million of them in a zig zag pattern next to each other, climbing towards the sky.

Getting past them requires a perfect timing of each jump in a sequence of many. Even the smallest hint of hesitation sends our cat protagonist straight into the abyss.

The game also has a variety of custom levels (but no built in level editor), from which I can recall one that is focused on the magic sword powerups. It is fun to see the enemies that usually give you such grief fall in a single blow of precisely aimed elemental destruction.

I have discovered from doing a little research that the game even had a gimmicky online mode. It used some kind of 90s style centralized network. It is prominently mentioned in the period marketing, but seems like a laughable tack on to me nowadays.

It might also surprise you that this delightful adventure was crafted as the second game of Monolith, a game studio that has since worked on such classics as the F.E.A.R games and Middle Earth: Shadow od Mordor. I would´ve written something about humble beginnings here if Captain Claw weren´t so damn impressive to me.

The game has an active community that still makes mods and custom levels for it and I encourage you to seek out this classic gem, especially if you enjoy delightful 2D platformers with high challenge and production values.

It is also an exceedingly good games for those of you that have encountered schools with outdated computers in the same way as me. I have fond memories of installing the game on the class computer and playing it during breaks on our interactive blackboard.