Paws: A Shelter 2 Game (PC)
The first Shelter game is a structured narrative about a mother badger trying to help her children survive in a harsh world, but its gameplay mechanics are rather weak and repetitive. Shelter 2 manages to improve on your capabilities and how they come into play with its story of a mother lynx raising her young, but the more freeform approach to its world design and goals means it turns out worse than its predecessor since it can’t properly challenge the player. However, with Paws: A Shelter 2 Game (or just Paws for short), it seems like the creators of the Shelter series were mixing the strengths of both Shelter titles, the expanded mechanics of Shelter 2 now being put to use in a structured linear narrative similar to Shelter 1. This could have been a chance to present well-crafted events for the player to engage with as the young lynx protagonist, but mixing together two good aspects of other games does not always a good game make.
Paws is actually a prequel to Shelter 2, the focus put on that game’s mother lynx when she was just a kitten. One day when she’s out hunting with her siblings and mother, the baby lynx ends up washed down river, separated from her kin and immediately setting out to try and find her way back. The adventure from there takes you through a few locations in this rather short journey to find your lost family, and while the areas you pass through are somewhat open to mild exploration, the path forward is fairly linear. While your journey starts off a lonesome one, soon the lynx will be joined by a bear cub who has also been separated from its family, and the crux of this game seems to be the small friendship between these two animals as they tough it out in the wilderness together. Toughing it out is more like leading the bear to berry bushes and helping it find its way forward, but the animals still have some cute moments of bonding before the story wraps up with the player making a choice about how they want the lynx to live.
The friendship with the bear is the only really major moment of interest in the entire game, and for something so much of the game’s emotional resonance rests on, it’s a surprisingly basic relationship. There’s only one real moment that seems to show how close the two have become and the process of becoming better friends is mostly just doing basic actions together that I hesitate to even classify as puzzles. Sometimes the little lynx needs to climb up on the bear to get a boost to a higher area, and sometimes the cat needs to stand on a branch to lower it so the bear can climb up, but these actions are never hard to execute or figure out. It’s a fairly plain sort of relationship that tries to tug your heartstrings without doing much more besides having the two animals in proximity for a short amount of time, and while it is nice to have the companion and the game does give them one or two touching moments, it’s certainly not the deep emotional core you’d hope to find in a game that has very little else to offer.
The story has a few supernatural moments involving stars and poetry pops up to try and lend more weight to the proceedings, but Paws feels like it’s straying even more from Shelter’s original realistic approach to natural life. There are no signs of humans still, but there is a portion where the bear and lynx cub ride a log over water and have the know-how to paddle the log around like a little canoe. The game probably has more in common with animal adventure films than real life unusual animal friendships, but that isn’t necessarily a flaw if that’s the direction the developers want to take the Shelter series. The particle board inspired texturing approach on pronounced polygonal models and environments still give Paws the series’s trademark art direction, and with Paws’s plot in particular, the game almost feels close to a storybook, especially when the sky is filled with patterns that evoke the kind of light projector that displays celestial objects on a room’s ceiling. It’s a game that can be pretty at the right angles, but the roughness of the animal models does mean zooming in too close can overemphasize the odd shape of the lynx cub’s body.
Paws: A Shelter 2 Game has many of the mechanics familiar to players of Shelter 2. You can activate a special sense to dull the world save for areas of interest, this ability letting you spot prey in the environment as well as the footprints of your missing family. Hunting for animals is still part of the adventure, the young cat still just learning how to catch food at all but having a few options across the adventure. Butterflies can be snagged out of the air if you’re adept, you must sneak up on birds to grab them before they fly off, frogs try to leap out of the path of your pounce, and sometimes you can just find berries on the ground to eat without issue. Catching food isn’t really challenging and just ends up being something you do along your journey rather than it serving as a trying task or one that’s particularly fun to engage with. Sometimes the game will restrict an area’s amount of food, but it still doesn’t feel like you’ll ever need to worry about not finding any. Unfortunately, despite pouncing, stalking, and your senses all playing into the hunting, there’s little else for your range of abilities to be tested against.
Paws is mostly about the journey of following your mother’s footprints, and to that effect, you are encouraged to keep on a straight path that only really tests you by putting some jumps in your way. If you run to speed things up you’ll find the lynx cub doesn’t control as cleanly as you might expect, her turns not as tight as you’d like and the player easily able to smack her head against a wall and causing a chain of bumps as you try to get her back to walking so she can do normal jumps instead or running leaps. Some areas you climb have small steps to hop up that can be bothersome to traverse whether you’re running or not, but they aren’t so difficult that they would approach something deliberately challenging. You mostly just need to wrangle your kitten a bit as it does this simple task. Sometimes you need to walk across a branch that you must get on properly or the cat won’t properly magnetize to its surface as well, but like most things in Paws, just being a little persistent will get the job done.
The environments in Paws: A Shelter 2 Game are a step in the right direction though, the lynx cub’s quest sending her through some interesting areas. A swamp full of angry swans will try to slap you away if you get close to their eggs, and in a foggy area you can’t be too sure how safe you are as you navigate the open rocky grounds. Many areas are somewhat open to allow the player to go off the beaten path in search of things like the golden collectible items or areas where you can stand to get pieces of a mural. The mural actually displays key events in the lynx kitten’s adventure, and it does a pretty good job of showing how few there actually are, most danger only appearing during scripted segments or ending up like the swans where you just get knocked away if you don’t easily avoid them. The game never really asks for creative maneuvering or responding to the current situation in any way beyond snagging food and leaping up ledges, so funnily enough, the best thing the game has going for it is a very short length that means you won’t really find it dragging anywhere. You can push forward pretty quickly and only the controls really seem to impede a player who is staying on the path to completion, so Paws can at least say that its weak design doesn’t have the time to get old or irritating.
THE VERDICT: The short adventure that is Paws: A Shelter 2 Game is really hoping you develop a fondness for that bear your baby lynx becomes friends with, because without that emotional connection to a creature you spend barely any time with, it’s left without much to offer. The hunting is too plain to entertain, navigation is more about the hitches in your slightly odd movement than any true challenge, and the optional content isn’t compelling enough to pursue. So much of Paws is just outright dull that it needs its story to resonate with the player to make up for an otherwise hollow experience, and even if the inherent cuteness of the baby animal pair grabs you, there’s nothing else to the game to make spending time as the two all that enjoyable.
And so, I give Paws 2: A Shelter Game for PC…
A BAD rating. While the baby lynx can do a fair bit more than the badger in the original Shelter, it doesn’t face the same kinds of memorable obstacles she did. You’re definitely forced to engage more with what’s set before you than players did in Shelter 2, but Paws feels incredibly empty if you put aside the bear friendship for a bit. Hunting prey isn’t a challenge, getting around is rarely a trial, and few things truly feel like they’re testing the player beyond their ability to figure out where footprints are heading. We’re pretty much left to determine the game’s quality on the relationship between the bear cub and baby lynx since everything else is either unexceptional or has little problems like the sometimes awkward movement. The game does devote what time it can to the two unlikely friends but also fails to give them anything too spectacular to strengthen their bond, there being one big dramatic moment but otherwise it feels like a lot of moving around together rather than truly interacting. Sure you stand on its back sometimes and you need to help it climb up to areas it couldn’t reach otherwise, but the friendship with the bear feels shallow and its big moments are practically unearned. It’s much easier to recommend something like the Disney film The Fox and the Hound for exploring a strange animal friendship, and that film at least had things to say about the two companions rather than Paws’s rather simple story line. The incredibly short length is definitely not doing it any favors here as you aren’t given the time to connect to the bear unless you just admit it into your heart for free since it’s so cute.
Paws: A Shelter 2 Game goes for the frankly unbelievable price of 14.99 when it feels more like 2 dollar DLC or even just an alternate mode that should have been a free part of Shelter 2. The game doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say or any gameplay elements that help it stand out, and while it’s artistic design is interesting, its plot leans on a shallow friendship between creatures that doesn’t earn the emotional beats it suddenly tries to hit. Were it just some throwaway mode in Shelter 2 it would be easier to forgive its lacking substance, but as a full release it comes up incredibly short. The player is given far too much of the onus for actually get invested in what’s on screen rather than the game earning it through its design, so unless you’re the kind of player who will be immediately enraptured by the opportunity to play as a lynx in a game that can occasionally pass for mildly realistic, it’s not likely that Paws: A Shelter 2 Game will offer anything that will grab you.