It seems that every other Metroidvania that comes out takes a large amount of inspiration from Hollow Knight. Fatal Claw clearly follows suit, down to the art style, aspects of its exploration, and the way its health and healing systems work. Once you get past that, though, you’ll find a highly engaging game with a lot of its own identity and surprisingly tight design and storytelling.
Fatal Claw puts you in the paws of Kisha, a cat that has arrived in a ruined kingdom. Kisha’s tasked with putting down the source of a zombie-esque infection and opening seals so that the few survivors can escape. The backstory and everything here is surprisingly in-depth and interesting, even though I typically find myself not caring about any of that in most Metroidvanias.
In terms of similarities to Hollow Knight, you’ll be running around a dead kingdom while grabbing upgrades and currency. Kisha has a multi-hit combo that can be extended and improved, as well as a few different kinds of attacks. Overall, the combat here feels more engaging than HK’s. The health chunk system also shows up, and you’ll get new chunks by combining two item pieces.
One difference I appreciated is that your magic and healing gauges are separate, which is something about HK that often led me to barely use skills in lieu of healing. There’s a decent variety of skills available, and some can even be combined into more powerful variations. While there are technically corpse runs, you only drop your current mana pool upon death, so losing it doesn’t matter much.
The game thankfully uses a traditional mapping system, too, so you won’t have to purchase maps and then fill them in; everything fills up as you explore. You can place markers on the map too (and drones akin to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s screenshot system), but these aren’t typically necessary since the map does an excellent job of adding more than enough detail to clearly denote where major points of interest are.
Kisha handles very nicely as well. Everything’s responsive, and gameplay flows quite well, especially once your full kit’s unlocked. There’s a good amount of enemy variety too, plus some tricky platforming sections that are really few and far between. There are some difficulty spikes here and there, but they’re uncommon, and things mostly flow smoothly.
A couple of late game boss battles are a bit much, as the bosses are so strong and fast that they seem to outpace Kisha’s kit somewhat, but they’re still doable without a huge amount of practice. The game can be beaten in around a dozen hours or so, so it’s not incredibly long, but a sort of new game plus system (that I don’t want to go into detail about due to spoilers) adds a novel touch for anyone that wants to hunt down extra endings or changes.
Verdict
Fatal Claw is a fairly excellent Metroidvania with lots of enjoyable combat and exploration that really nails what I love about the genre. It can feel a bit familiar at times, but there’s a ton of heart and depth to be found here (and having a good story helps put a nice bow on the package). If you’re looking for your next great Metroidvania, this may well be it.
