If you remember Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, you will have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Weird Beluga‘s upcoming isometric twin-stick shooter Clid The Snail.
Presented as a dark fable about trying to find a home, Clid puts players in the well-worn boots of the titular anthropomorphic gastropod.
Exiled from his clan for being a hard-drinking troublemaker, Clid is left to try and find a new place amongst the dank tunnels and desolate wastes.
Along with his annoying firefly companion, Belu, Clid eventually joins up with The Alastor, a group of outcasts and misfits who have come together to fight an encroaching army of magical slugs that are sweeping across the land.
During our brief hands-on, covering the game’s opening hour, it was clear that Clid isn’t your average Twin-stick shooter. It’s not a fast-paced bullet hell but a more methodical and strategic affair that treats your arsenal more like a toolbox rather than a selection of increasingly large hammers. Like Doom 2016, different weapons are more effective against different enemy types, and figuring out what to use and when is half the battle and half the fun.
During the preview, we were given four guns to help blast our way through the game’s varied rogues gallery of hostile slugs, insects, and animals.
Each hostile creature attacks differently, with some teleporting around the map while others charge you, often with explosive results. I found there was a need to change tactics and weapons regularly, whether it was using the widespread of the shotgun to cut through mobs or the chargeable laser to weaken more powerful foes.
Clid can also equip different shells that help augment his abilities and get out of sticky situations. This includes a shell that creates a protective bubble around him and another that fires a volley of rockets at enemies.
Like Neon Giant’s The Ascent, both cover and height play a key role in the gunplay and knowing where to position yourself is vital to success. Ingenious environmental puzzles and a good helping of exploration help break up Clid’s set-pieces and reward players with upgrades, additional health, and lots of environmental world-building.
The world of Clid is harsh yet beautiful. Set in a time long after humans have gone the way of the dodo, and animals have evolved to a point where they can harness the technology everyday folks left behind, like Wombles with grenade launchers.
As you traverse the undergrowth running across ramshackle bridges and exploring tunnels hewn from the earth, you catch glimpses of the artefacts left by the previous rulers of the world; a pencil, a broken drainpipe, a skull.
Meanwhile, the game’s piano-lead soundtrack creates a sombre tone as Clid explores this dying world. This is thrown straight out the window during the preview’s climax, which saw Clid battle against a genocidal Rat with a flamethrower called Ska. The piano is gone – replaced with chugging guitars and pounding drums. You’d think it would create emotional whiplash, but it is executed in such a way to feel more like a crescendo than a jarring change of key.
This tense boss encounter was a fitting end to the demo and forced me to use all of the tricks I had learned in the run-up to the battle, which saw Clid diving behind cover and waiting for an opening to return fire while using his shell abilities to help push the rat bastard back.
My only niggle is the voice acting, which has characters’ subtitled while they mumble at each other in incomprehensible gibberish, like Biomutant, but thankfully without the bloody narrator.
Otherwise, Clid The Snail looks like it could be a very promising adventure. With an intriguing premise, great characters, and a beguiling world that I am very much looking forward to diving back into when the game launches as a timed PlayStation exclusive later this year.