Cloudy with a Chance of Giving up Quickly
My Spanish is non-existent, so I assumed that A Clareira meant cloud. You spend the whole game as a cloud, trying to survive a kind of upside-down Space Invaders. But A Clareira actually means “clearing”. Well, there you go – I’ve learned something.
The reason for “clearing” becomes evident as A Clareira goes on. At the end of a session in A Clareira, information pops up about ecological disasters happening in regions of South America, such as the deforestation of the Amazon. It’s a little dislocated from the shoot ’em up stuff, but there’s a noble spirit within A Clareira.
Playing Space Invaders Upside-Down
And to continue the “clearing” theme, it’s one of the things that A Clareira definitely doesn’t give you. This is a very simple shoot ’em up but the bullet-hell is very real. Particularly in the game’s two harder levels – Pantanal and Cerrado – it can feel almost impossible to make room for your little cloud. The screen fills with projectiles and there is nowhere to turn.
While it’s a difficult, verging on impossible game, A Clareira starts easily. The first level is the Amazon, and you get introduced to the game’s inverted perspective. You are a cloud running across the top of the screen, raining droplets on the flame enemies below. They appear as the level wears on, and if you don’t keep on top of them then they will become an unwieldy, crowded mess.
The fires throw fireballs at your wee cloud, and they also die with one final fireball. That death-rattle means that you have to be constantly on the move. You can’t stay where you are because you are guaranteed to be hit by a dying fire. There’s a health system at play, so you can afford to be hit a few times, but that’s only going to last so long.
Batteries and Shields are Your Friends
Tipping the balance slightly more in your favour are some power-ups. These need to be shot to collect them (harder than it seems when your droplets prioritise enemies) and vary pretty wildly. Shields give you some protection from fire; batteries give you a kind of smart-bomb lightning bolt; and hearts give you health. In perhaps the first sign that A Clareira isn’t hugely polished, there are also some power-ups that we can only guess at. We’ve picked up eggs and ice creams and have no idea what they do. Increasing the score? We’re not sure.
The Amazon level acts like something of a tutorial. We completed it, reaching the end of its 20 levels, on our first go. There’s no escalating challenge other than an increasing number of fires, and we’d learned that strafing was the way to go. You can drive-by, showering the fires in a long horizontal strafe, and that gets you to the end without much trouble.
Pantanal and Cerrado are different beasts entirely. Sure, these biomes follow the same template as Amazon – one fire-type each, the same power-ups, the same level rules – but their fires are many times more dangerous. In Pantanal, when a fire is extinguished, it releases two fireballs. In Cerrado, three. Suddenly, you want to be nowhere near a dying fire, and that’s before we mention the increased number of enemies and their greater rate of fire.
Fighting Fires with Your Shoelaces Tied Together
When the difficulty goes up, A Clareira’s limitations become clearer. Your cloud is incredibly, annoyingly slow. On Amazon that’s fine, but in these later biomes the lack of mobility means a constant threat of death. You almost don’t have enough time to kill something and get away from its resulting death-burp. You’re performing hit-and-runs on enemies and hoping that you’ve left enough space for the ‘run’ part.
I just didn’t feel like I had the tools to face what A Clareira threw at me. It wasn’t just the lack of speed: the cloud is quite a large ‘ship’, so dodging through fires wasn’t wholly possible. And A Clareira keeps a tight throttle on how many raindrops you can fire at once, meaning you can’t clear out a cluster of fires quickly. Things snowball: if you don’t one-shot every enemy that arrives, you can quickly achieve a state where nothing is going to save you.
My survival largely depended on the randomness of power-ups. I needed batteries to survive, clearing the screen in a spate of lightning bolts, or I wouldn’t make it to the latter achievements. And I don’t think it’s a bad-player thing. There really don’t seem to be many or any good plays in A Clareira.
It leaves the game feeling a little disempowering. I rarely felt like I was a badass in A Clareira, not in the same way that the best shmups make me feel. The biomes don’t help here either: Amazon is too trivial, while Pantanal and Cerrado bounce me off. I couldn’t find a location that really felt good to play. Some combination of Amazon and Pantanal’s enemies would have felt about right.
Even if you’re a shoot ’em up god and you dismiss these criticisms as a lack of player skill, I don’t think there’s enough in A Clareira to warrant a purchase. There are only three enemy types and they are ring-fenced to one level each. Your little cloud can increase the number of droplets fired through power-ups, but that’s the limit of what you’re handed. And the only real countermeasures to the fires are to strafe, back and forth. Events become one-dimensional very quickly.
A Big Heart but Lack of Muscle
I do appreciate what A Clareira is doing. I’m fully behind the ecological message, and the presentation is several notches above the average indie game (both in audio and visuals). It’s taking Space Invaders and shaking it about in a snow-globe.
I just couldn’t bring myself to play A Clareira for long stretches. It swings, pendulum-like, between too-easy and impossible. We’d love to see someone reach level 20 on Cerrado while man-handling a large, slow and powerless cloud. Even if that someone did manage it, I’m not sure they would enjoy the variety. Once you’ve seen one cloud, you’ve seen them all.
Important Links
Fight Wildfires As A Cloud In A Clareira On Xbox – https://www.thexboxhub.com/fight-wildfires-as-a-cloud-in-a-clareira-on-xbox/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/a-clareira-xbox-series/9n386k8shm8t
There’s an Xbox One version – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/a-clareira-xbox-one/9p0nwxsgnzg0
And one for Windows PC – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/a-clareira-windows/9pkf46flm8tl
