Have you ever lost an engagement ring in a grabbing machine? No? Me too. But in Cupiclaw“roguelike deck-building claw machine game” from French developer Julien Tran, you’ll play as a man named Morris who has lost his engagement ring and is forced to play furiously Very high-priced grabbing machine to get it back.
Cupiclaw It’s not available yet, but Tran has a demo available on Couplewhere you will be able to go through five levels. Basically the gist Cupiclaw is that you have to play the claw machine and win prizes to be able to move on to the next claw machine – and then keep doing that until you find the Morris ring. Simple, right? Well, Cupiclaw is actually quite hard: roguelike elements and deck-building mean there’s a lot of strategy both in terms of the rewards you’re fighting for AND in novel prizes that you can choose between each round, which are then added to the claw machine. Each prize has its own feature that changes the way you play. For example, there is a gem that you can add to the machine that increases the prize payout for all the bears you collect. But if you don’t collect any bears, you’re effectively losing out on a ton of coins.
There are also bad prizes to avoid, like the tons of soda cans that have been thrown into the machine. You’ll lose more and more coins as you switch between the grapple machines. There are also other items that subtract points — so you have to balance your strategy of collecting good items with avoiding bad ones, but sometimes you have to sacrifice a little bit of points for the sake of the speed of it all.
At the end of a round that lasts only a few minutes, you advance if you have enough money to pay for another button press. Otherwise, Morris falls to the ground in despair and you have to start over. Due to the nature of the roguelike game, Cupiclaw you can play forever — and it’s always different. I had a blast trying different combinations to collect as many coins as possible. And so far I haven’t reached Morris’s engagement ring — or the end of the five levels.
Tran didn’t say when Cupiclaw will be released, but the demo itself provides enough fun to last a while.
