Cliff Kingdom Game Demo Review
Verdict: Play
Cliff Kingdom is strange, funny, and directionless in ways that mostly work.
Cliff Kingdom is a hand-drawn 2D Metroidvania from developer Most Likely No Reason For Hysteria. You play as Mothboy, last in a long line of lightkeepers, exploring a dark warren of interconnected biomes inside a cliff, searching for a lost light. The world is strange, funny, and beautiful. The direction is not always clear.
Cliff Kingdom trusts you to find your own reason to keep going. The creatures are the best part, and the art makes exploration feel worthwhile even without a clear objective. The platforming friction and lack of orientation add up, but the demo is worth playing if you are comfortable with ambiguity.
Pros
- Genuinely beautiful hand-drawn art
- Memorable, characterful creatures
- Rewarding exploration for patient players
- A few hours of content in the demo
Cons
- Very little direction or signposting
- No map until late into the demo
- Wall-climbing controls have rough edges
- Save point system is confusing
## First Impressions
I met a depressed whale and still did not know what I was doing. The whale wanted me to kill him. The badger was looking for more friends. The slug had armour that sat on its head like a toupee, so I named him Steven, and later found a lot of his relatives scattered around the map.
I spent an hour in Cliff Kingdom not really knowing what I was supposed to be doing, just going deeper into the dark, taking back routes, finding hidden zones with possums in them, doubling back on myself. By the end I had cleared most of the chambers the map showed, once I finally found a map. I still thought it was worth the time.
## What the Game Is
Mothboy is the last in a line of lightkeepers, summoned because the lighthouse has gone dark. The world is a warren of interconnected biomes inside a cliff in the middle of the sea: caves, platforms, creatures, and machines from whatever came before. It sits in the same space as Well Dweller, a dark hand-drawn 2D Metroidvania reviewed here a couple of weeks ago. The difference is that Well Dweller gave you a clearer sense of what you were working toward. Cliff Kingdom trusts you to find your own reasons to keep going.
The art is what makes that trust feel reasonable. Hand-drawn, dark, and detailed enough that going off the obvious path feels like it might reveal something worth finding. Usually it does. The creatures you meet are genuinely memorable in a way that most Metroidvania worlds are not.
## Rough Edges
The game gives you very little to orient yourself early on. No map until you find one in the world. No position marker until you unlock a trinket that shows where you are. Signposts point in a general direction. For the first portion of the session, navigation was largely by instinct and memory.
The platforming controls have rough edges that feel noticeable given how much vertical movement the game asks of you. Trying to cling to a wall and missing the grab, then sliding off onto spikes, happened enough times to become a pattern rather than an occasional mistake. The save point system also caught me out. I locked myself to the surface save point without realising and could not work out how to get back to the one closer to the centre of the map.
## Verdict
Download it, with the expectation that you are going in without a clear objective and finding your own way through. If that sounds frustrating rather than appealing, this is probably not the right game for you right now.
If you enjoyed Well Dweller, or enjoy dark atmospheric Metroidvanias where the world is the point as much as the mechanics, there is an hour of genuinely strange and interesting exploration here. The controls need polish and the direction needs signposting. The whale, the badger, and the many Stevens make it worth the time anyway.
Developer: Most likely no reason for hysteria
View on Steam
Watch the video review: YouTube
Tags: Metroidvania, Platformer, Indie, Adventure
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