Good entertainment is a funny thing. In the age of constantly accepted media, it can be all too easy to take for granted how bad it could actually be. That’s part of the reason I’m interested in games like XIII Remake. Not the games you hoped would be good but then crumbled wildly into a pile of incoherent mechanics, mind you. These are just frustrating. But then there are games like Cabela’s Survival: Shadow of Katmai, which are never going to be a good game, nor do they have to be.
So there’s Shadows of Katmai, a spin-off of Cabela’s trademark hunting games that attempts to deliver an Uncharted-style adventure with key voice actors and cinematic gameplay drawn from Naughty Dog’s playbook. It was Cabela’s and Activision So Confident in this game they actually designed a custom gun shaped controller that only works with Shadows of Katmai. This console raised the game’s launch price to over $80. Unfortunately, I haven’t tracked down the controller to play this, because as the owner of two PS Move shooters I already have too many motion controllers to store in one desk.
The amazing thing about Shadows of Katmai is that you can see developer Funlabs trying incredibly hard despite having neither the budget nor the resources to realize their ambitions here. Fortunately, their efforts weren’t completely in vain, because Shadows of Katmai is one of the most hilarious action-adventure games ever made. Nothing in the narrative is told coherently although the likes of Laura Bailey, Robin Atkin Downes and Troy Baker really do give good performances. Any attempts to depict survival in the real world are so farcical that I have to wonder if it was publisher interference or a lack of research.
Logan James, our ruthless protagonist, would sooner stick someone in a fresh moose carcass than just build a fire with wood galore around him. There are two different instances of Logan and Ally falling a thousand feet without breaking a single bone. Every animal in nature (besides one loyal dojo) absolutely hates Logan, attacking him endlessly wherever he goes, and coming off like Locust in Gears of War.
You’re forced to battle a phalanx of wolves, the very literal killing of crows, bats that snap like pomegranates, and a bear that wields a tree trunk like Sif wielding his master’s sword in Dark Souls. Not one problem can’t be solved by catching a moose, or three. The lone Native American character is portrayed as a distant eccentric until his veteran status is mentioned, after which no one questions him again. The all-time hauling-and-saving scientist Logan is portrayed as a picky jerk whenever possible.
Meanwhile, Logan praises the Second Amendment when he finds that his shotgun shoots better than anyone in Sniper Elite; He even has the X-Ray Bullet Temporal ability designed specifically for animals! He makes jokes that your uncle in trouble would laugh at, and he has some of the silliest jokes, over the top barking whenever he gets hurt. He solves every problem by breaking something, climbing over something, or just shooting every living thing within a mile radius. It really is a backwards fantasy, until the big twist is revealed.
are you ready? Have you guessed it yet? I’ll give you a minute.
Well, then… why is the world so afraid and so eager to reach a remote village? for the delivery of vaccines. These vaccines are necessary to ward off a virus comparable to the Spanish flu. It must have sounded like something someone would take seriously in 2011. Oh, the irony, right? These shots are about the size of adult men, no less, in case you were worried that Shadows of Katmai would automatically become a dangerous game, bootlegged under the Cabela’s license.
Despite the unnecessary amounts of story for a two-and-a-half-hour campaign, you’ll spend most of your time on challenging physics. If Shadows of Katmai is fodder for anything, it’s the speedrunning community. I crawled alongside mountain ledges with charged leaps, sometimes skipping up to two minutes of climbing. The dog sledding sections are so hilariously broken that sometimes the physics engine stops working, sending you flying over the level as you take random damage until the game tries to reset itself. There’s a five-minute clip about trying to catch the attention of a passing plane when there’s a loaded flare gun in your inventory. Several levels are the same area with different ways of pretending to vary, with plenty of crash glitches that I could imagine being exploited for even stunts.
Katmai Shades almost feels like a parody with certain camera angles and lines of dialogue. The result is something similar to Kung-Pow: Enter the Fist – an inconsistent slice of semi-parody of cultural parody. To call this a realistic depiction of survival in any way is to be on the verge of insanity, but that’s kind of the point.
During the short runtime that Shadows of Katmai wandered across its titular mountain, I was utterly intrigued, wondering how something so alien could be released onto Earth with such blind confidence, only to be forgotten in an instant. This game deserves to be stuck in the annals of “so bad it’s good” media, which is a huge step for the studio that’s notably behind it.
In the years since, while their output has never been great, Funlabs has continued to produce Nerf Legends recently, and it’s one of their best efforts. This is perhaps the most beautiful part of it all – as messy as Katmai’s shadows may be, no one has lost anything on them. Instead, it’s a charmingly bizarre piece of gaming history, a veritable Icarus of interconnected hunting games that aims for its own good.
Oh, and before you go? They stop telling you Logan’s name until the end of the game, as if it were an MCU reveal, for no reason. Unless that would explain the amazing jump? And he broke the hard ice with his bare fists, and … well, you’re done.
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