Video Game / Claw

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Claw (also known as Captain Claw) is a 1997 PC platformer published by Monolith Productions. It tells the story of a certain cat pirate captain, named Nathaniel Joseph Claw and his quest to find the parts of the Amulet of Nine Lives. While the plot is mostly an excuse, the story gets interesting due to the characters in it, particularly Claw, whose snarky comments make it pretty obvious who you are dealing with.

The game was generally well received, being notable for its gorgeous looking graphics, great atmosphere and fun gameplay. It had quite a few hand-drawn cutscenes (about 18 minutes in total), giving it a movie-esque feeling. It's also worth noticing that it's HARD AS HELL.

The game can no longer be bought, but it can be obtained through other ways. Because it has a level editor, its fan base is still active even to this day, creating new levels and new challenges.

Has no relation to the film or the web serial novel.

You can read more about it here.

This Video Game provides examples of:

• Addiction-Powered: Catnip functions as a temporary power-up that causes Claw to run faster, jump higher and hit harder.
• All There in the Manual: There's a downloadable document called "Claw Design Document" which highlights a few things, for example that Catherine was kicked out of Claw's crew for "recklessness".
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: The original release features cover art of a more photorealistic Claw (see the page image). As for the Japanese one, it has him look exactly as he does in-game, while accompanied by other characters.
• Badass Adorable: Captain Claw is a cat and looks kinda cute in his uniform and kitten look on his face. But he's one tough badass of a pirate who will hunt all the mooks and bosses down if it means making way to the amulet's stones.
• Bottomless Pit: Always disguised as a liquid, be it water, brine, sewage or lava.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: If you keep Claw waiting, he'll ask you to at least bring him something from the kitchen.
• Blow You Away: Red Tail can control the wind. Don't stand on the lower level of the arena no matter what, or you'll need to spend all your leg strength not to get pushed into wall spikes.
• Captain Obvious: The male mercat creatures like to point out that they are dying/dead with "I seem to be deceased" or "Well, I'm no longer among the living, am I?".
• Cats Have Nine Lives:
  • Captain Claw is a cat seeking out The Amulet of Nine Lives, which, at the finale of his quest, is granted to him by Princess Adora, a feline deity.
  • Peg Leg pirates protest when picked up with "Put me down! I only have one life!"
• Charged Attack: Anything throwable (dynamite, gunpowder barrels, and enemies) goes farther the longer you hold the command key.
• Collision Damage: Claw takes damage merely on contact with enemies.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: None of the bosses take damage from ammo-based attacks (Pistol, Magic Claw and Dynamite), but at least need to put in some effort to block them, briefly flinching instead of attacking. Additionally, bosses cannot be picked up and thrown, with the exception of Catherine and Gabriel, who are missing sprites for being picked up, indicating that being able to lift them up is an oversight.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Lava is everywhere in the Temple, even in massive lavafalls, yet it doesn't bother Captain Claw or the Tiger Guards barring his path. Only direct hits with jets of lava or falling into pools of it are dangerous.
• Crate Expectations: There's always something in the many crates placed around the levels, with pieces of treasure or healing drinks/food you can collect.
• Cycle of Hurting: Since the Killer Bear Hugs from Bear Sailors put Claw flush against their body, he can be damaged and stunned right as the grab ends due to Collision Damage (especially if you buttonmash to break out early and end up escaping when pressing the movement key to move towards the enemy), which gives the Bear enough time to catch Claw again.
• Death Throws: Unless killed by spike pits, pools of liquid or damage of being thrown, enemies and the protagonist fall off the screen at death: enemies have some horizontal velocity and fall in a curve, while Claw lingers for a moment then drops straight down.
• Denial of Diagonal Attack: Most of enemy attacks, Claw's pistol shots, Magic Claw swipes and sword strikes can only go horizontally. To hit the bomb-throwing mice and certain crates, Captain Claw needs to crouch down before attacking. If you really need to clear out a landing spot on a different elevation, dynamite might help as it's affected by gravity.
• Disadvantageous Disintegration: While tossing foes into spike pits and deadly pools works perfectly well, it means that together with them you're also tossing away any and all loot they had.
• Distracted by My Own Sexy: In the Caverns and Undersea Caves, there are strange feline mermen who occasionally cry out: "Gosh, I'm handsome!".
• Dismantled MacGuffin: The Amulet of Nine Lives. Claw must find nine gems to assemble it.
• Dumb Muscle: Sailor Bears are dimwitted but strong creatures. They drop lines like "Umm... I don't like you!" and "I'm hungry."
• Energy Absorption: Hitting Omar with the wrong type of powered-up sword or the Magic Claw makes him actually heal up a hit.
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Even seagulls will tackle you. "Bloody birds" indeed.
• Exploding Barrels: Gunpowder-filled ones at that. Claw can pick them up and throw them at enemies, or simply shoot them with his pistol.
• Falling Damage:
  • Not completely Averted: long falls make Claw feel unpleasant and lose his breath for a moment where he's stunned, but unharmed.
  • Thrown enemies seem to take extra damage if they fall for longer.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: The game itself is very tame, with enemies dying more in cartoony ways, and there is no blood. Except one of cutscenes — after the fight with Claw, Red Tail holds his wounded hand tightly, bleeding so much that a pool of blood forms beneath.
• Flunky Boss: Gabriel will sic Red Tail Pirates at you from time to time.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Claw can find Power Ups that enchant his sword with Elemental Powers: The Fire Sword, Frost Sword, and Lightning Sword. Functionally, they're the exact same: Sword Beams that go through enemies. Devs were planning to put Plasma Sword as well, but it never made it to the actual gameplay. An icon of it can still be found in the map editor, though.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: Sort of when fighting Marrow. After chipping away a fourth part of his health, he calls his parrot to transport him to the other side of the arena and retracts the bridge over the spike pit, forcing you to face this annoying bird three more times again.
• Glass Cannon: Mice deal 15 points of damage and appear since the first level, but are very predictable and being breathed on them kills them. Bear Sailors with their literal bear hug that deals ''enormous'' damage over time and the toughness of wet paper and Peg Legs with their two-hit combo and two-hit health.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: If you get closer than sword range, Claw will resort to his bare limbs (attacks vary among a straight punch, an uppercut, and a high kick). They do more damage and strike faster than the sword, and are also unblockable. Getting close enough to punch and kick is often the best way to hurt bosses.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Claw can pick up enemies if he gets close enough to them, and he can throw them a fair distance. Hitting another foe with the thrown mook is a One-Hit Kill for the one that gets hit.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Many people don't know that giving Claw a few seconds of a running start puts him in a particular state where he can run slightly faster and jump slightly higher than usual. This is vital for collecting some pieces of treasure and can leave you wondering what should you do to get them.
  • If you want to go for 100% Completion (collect all the treasures throughout the level), be prepared for sheer and utter hell. There are often areas that must be accessed by a Leap of Faith, and it's not even apparent you're supposed to do that. Another area in Level 2 has clouds that are actually platforms you can jump on, but there is only the lack of parallel scrolling that indicates they're not part of the background to hint at it.
• Guns Akimbo:
  • Claw is sometimes portrayed with one flintlock pistol on each hand, though in gameplay he sticks to only one.
  • Peg Legs use two guns, and fire them liberally.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: Despite wielding a flintlock, as long as ammo allows Claw can somehow pull off fully automatic fire with it.
• Hand Cannon: Red Tail's pistol is either of a massive caliber or magical in nature, because the projectile is huge.
• Hollywood Chameleons: Hostile chameleons appear in the last two levels, that attack by smacking you with their tongues. Their camouflage functions as full-blown invincibility — Claw cannot hit them at all until they reveal themselves.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: If Claw is damaged, picking up food heals him up with measly 5% health, consumed with a "smack smack smack" sound effect. Pickups change across levels to fit into the areas they're found in: prison of La Roca offers bread and water, fruits can be found in the woods of the Footpath, around the Docks there are fish, etc.
  Claw: Looks yummy.
• Idle Animation: Claw will cross his arms and sway back and forth if you leave him idling.
• Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: Traversing the Pirates' Cove is made more difficult due to black conveyor belts there. They're almost always riddled with arrow traps. As a fun fact, running on the fastest variation of the conveyor belt makes Claw so fast that screen scrolling cannot keep up with him.
• Inexplicably Awesome: We never learn how Claw obtained his "Magic Claw" spell.
• Killer Bear Hug: Sailor Bears can grab Captain Claw and squeeze life out of him.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook:
  • Mercats wield tridents with which they block crouch attacks 100% of the time.
  • Peg Legs cannot be hurt by bullets. Somehow their gunslinging ways grant them immunity to firearms?
• Lighter and Softer: For Monolith, and even marketed this way. It came out the same year as Blood and Captain Claw even shares Caleb's voice actor, Stephan Weyte, but the game was marketed as being much lighter on violent content than many games of the time.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Attempts to obtain all treasure in a level are complicated by the randomized velocity of treasure dropped from enemies, which can easily destroy itself by bouncing into a death pit.
  • Marrow's parrot is a bane of speedrunners whenever it decides to simply not attack, stalling the boss fight.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Furry Pirate Wizard.
• Marathon Boss: Omar. For starters, he protects himself with a rotating Orbiting Particle Shield of either ice or fire with a tiny gap in it. To counter it, you to travel through several death traps to grab a magic sword of the opposite element and then return through the same fiery death traps for an opportunity to hit him once, if you can time an elemental blast through the gap while being harassed. Repeat this four times to progress to the second phase to attack him directly, where he lobs energy balls at you while you need to nail precise jumps over deadly lava pits and teleports some more when you damage him.
• Mirrors of Vanity: Gabriel preens himself while holding a hand-mirror for the entirety of his boss fight.
• Nothing Personal: Marrow barks out that it's "nothing personal, Nathaniel" during his bossfight.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Half fish, half anthropomorphic cat. They can walk on dry land without a problem, yet die when thrown into the brine.
• Palette Swap: Most of the levels are paired off such that the first level introduces fresh types of enemies, then the level after it recycles them by changing their outfit colors, making them slightly tougher and sometimes teaching them new tricks. For example, the guards stationed at the Battlements have been trained in the art of crouching, unlike the guards from the previously escaped prison of La Roca. The exceptions are Tiger Island, which yet again reuses the Red Tail's crew from stages 7 and 8, and the unique tiger guardians in the final level of the Temple.
• Parrying Bullets: How Crazy Hook Monkeys and Tiger Guards manage to block a pistol shot with a small dagger is a mystery. Applies to all bosses as well. There's also Gabriel who will block everything with his arm (sans grabs), calmly reminding you that this is not how you beat him.
• Prepare to Die:
  • The doberman city guards of the Township and El Puerto del Lobo will occasionally say this word for word when engaging Claw, as will the male mercats in the Caverns and Undersea Caves. Likewise, Tiger Guards within the Temple warn you that "you will die there".
  • Claw declares to Marrow at the start of his boss fight:
    Captain Claw: Prepare for a watery grave, Marrow!
• Prison Level: After Nathaniel Claw is defeated and taken prisoner in the intro, players receive control over him as he begins his escape. Prison called La Roca is the first level, stationed by guards which are meant to ease the beginner players into the game and, like the rest of the game, filled with deadly traps as well as treasure. It is lit with the orange glowing torches and its soundscape consists of faraway groans of other prisoners, rattling chains, pickaxes hitting stone which suggest forced labor, and footsteps of patrols.
• Pummeling the Corpse: Due to a coding oversight, already defeated enemies still react to hits and process their death logic when damaged, repeating their defeat phrase while getting relaunched in the air. It brings no practical benefits, just amusement from juggling baddies around. This was found during development and intentionally not fixed.
• Puzzle Boss:
  • Gabriel can only be defeated by using his own cannon against him: hit the switch that makes it swivel up so when Gabriel orders it to fire, he is Hoist by His Own Petard.
  • Marrow. For whatever reason, his parrot closes the bridge over the otherwise impassable spike pit when it's exhausted, giving Claw access to its master.
  • Aquatis is beaten by knocking down stalactites hanging over his head by throwing dynamite into a barely visible hole in the wall behind him.
  • Omar's first phase has him impervious to all damage except — depending on what his shield is made from at the time — the Fire and Frost Swords.
• Saw Blades of Death: Spinning saw blades are stage hazards in the Pirates' Cove. They pop out and hide intermittently.
• Sequence Breaking: The "Catnip" power-up makes Claw run faster and jump higher, which is invaluable for collecting some trickier treasures. In the Shipyards, the power-up can be brought into the boss arena in order to reach Gabriel, grab him and toss him off the pier to kill him instantly. This makes the player to miss out on some treasure that catnip is supposed to be for.
• Shout-Out: Mostly found in cheat codes:
  • MPGANDOLF (sic) (full Magic Claws) for The Lord of the Rings, MPVADER (invulnerability powerup) for Star Wars, MPCASPER (invisibility powerup) for Casper the Friendly Ghost, MPJORDAN (higher jump) for Michael Jordan, MPFRANKLIN (Lightning Sword powerup) for Benjamin Franklin, MPSCULLY (go to next level), MPMOULDER (sic) (go to previous level) and MPSKINNER (teleport near boss arena) for The X-Files.
  • MPCULTIST (hard mode) might be a reference to Blood, Monolith's previous game, where cultists are basic and iconic mooks.
  • Omar's lines are exclusively Macbeth quotes.
• Smashing Survival: It's possible to break the hold of a Bear Sailor early by mashing movement keys. The more buttons you press, the earlier the grab concludes, limiting damage received and time spent immobilized.
• Spikes of Doom: Anything that falls or is thrown into a spike pit dies instantly with a Sickening "Crunch!", including Claw.
• Sword and Gun:
  • Claw has his saber and flintlock, but wields them both at the same time only in cinematics.
  • Two bosses use this combo: Red Tail and Marrow — supposedly, they are daggers.
• Throw a Barrel at It: Claw can pick up and toss the Exploding Barrels around most levels as a substitute for dynamite.
• Too Awesome to Use: Magic Claw one-shots everything in the game but bosses, including Tiger Guards, but the resources found are so scarce that you'll use it very rarely outside of the last level.
• Top-Heavy Guy: The body proportions of the Sailor Bears from the Red Tail's crew are heavily skewed in favor of their massive chests and muscular arms.
• Voiceover Letter: During the intro, when Claw finds Edward Tobin's letter in his cell and reads it. The voiceover even uses a tone fitting for someone who's resigned to his fate, as he was executed the following day after writing it.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • If you think that after defeating Le Rauxe you'll fight someone with only slightly higher difficulty, think again. Some people actually put Catherine (Level 4) on par in difficulty with Omar, yet she's only the second boss.
  • If Catherine failed to deliver the message, the boss after her, Wolvington, won't. He'll straight up counter attacks when hit and block even more often than the Final Boss, and he's able to rack up large amounts of damage very quickly against reckless players.