CLAWSTRIKE

Every so often a js13k entry doesn't just do well, it wins outright, and CLAWSTRIKE is 2025's answer to that: js13kgames.com's own archived results place it 1st overall out of the entire competition field that year, with a 1st-place finish in Theme, Graphics and Audio individually and a 2nd-place finish for Gameplay. That's not a single strong category propping up an average package; it's close to a clean sweep, and the thirty separate comments left on the entry read like thirty different people each finding a different thing to fall in love with.

A licensing note, up front

Before anything else: this review exists, but the game will not be appearing on leetdom's /games shelf. Rémi Vansteelandt's repository carries no LICENSE file, and the README's own License section is explicit and restrictive: "Feel free to read the code but don't use it for commercial purposes. The game is the result of a lot of hard work and I wish to maintain all rights to it. Please reach out if you wish to distribute the game on your portal." That's the author's right to set, and it's a meaningfully different situation from the "no licence stated" games this shelf sometimes hosts with a clear takedown offer attached — here the author has affirmatively said not to redistribute without asking first, so nothing from this game has been copied to this site's own servers, and this review was built entirely by playing the developer's own hosted build directly. Everything below is offered as an honest assessment of the game on its own considerable merits, independent of the hosting question.

The pitch, and why it works

You're a black cat. Someone killed your human. Every level is a short, brutal gauntlet of agents to stalk, distract, and cut down in three hits apiece, and the whole thing runs on instant death-and-retry pacing — miss a jump into spikes or take one hit too many, and the level resets immediately, same checkpoint, no loading screen, no menu detour. Testing confirmed this directly: dying in the tutorial area reset play in well under a second, with only the on-screen deaths counter incrementing to mark that anything had happened. Competition judge Gleb Volkov put it well: "failing doesn't ever feel frustrating because retries happen instantly." The "meow" mechanic — a distraction call that draws an agent's attention without giving away your position — is the one genuinely novel wrinkle in an otherwise familiar stealth-platformer toolkit, and several judges singled it out by name as the game's cleverest idea.

Controls: real touch support, once tested honestly

The game's own js13k listing promises full desktop and mobile support, and this review takes that kind of claim seriously enough to actually test it rather than repeat it. On a simulated phone, an instantaneous synthetic tap on the title screen's own "[TAP] TO START" prompt did nothing at first — a result that looked, briefly, like the mobile-optimisation claim didn't hold up. Retesting with a real sustained touch-and-release (driven through Chromium's actual touch input pipeline rather than an edge-case zero-duration tap) started the game immediately, and a proper on-screen control scheme was waiting: dedicated left and right movement buttons, a jump button, a restart shortcut, and separate meow and claw-attack buttons positioned along the screen edges. Holding the movement button visibly walked the character forward and off a platform edge into a death and instant retry, exactly the loop the game is built around. On desktop, WASD and Space worked identically for movement and attack. The one real, repeatable inconsistency found: a later tutorial prompt reading "[SPACE] = ATTACK" kept showing its keyboard binding throughout a touch-only test session, even though the title screen's own equivalent prompt had correctly swapped to "[TAP]" — the game's input-adaptive UI text isn't applied with full consistency everywhere it appears.

Presentation and the one credible bug report

The visual style is the easiest thing here to simply agree with the judges about: black silhouettes against a different bold flat colour per level, consistent drop shadows under every object, and a camera that moves with real weight during combat. It's a striking, cohesive look for a project built under a hard size limit, and the 1st-place graphics finish is earned rather than generous. One credible, specific bug report is worth passing on rather than either repeating uncritically or ignoring: judge Andy Sommerville reported the game crashing twice with an uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'x'), both times partway through the level that introduces rolling. Testing here did not encounter this crash in either the desktop or mobile sessions played, so it's reported here as a specific, attributable, first-party account rather than a personally confirmed finding — exactly the distinction a reader deserves between "I saw this happen" and "someone credible says this happened."

Final verdict

CLAWSTRIKE earned its 2025 js13k win honestly: the art direction is genuinely distinctive, the retry loop delivers on its own promise, and — the specific thing this kind of review exists to check — the mobile controls are real and functional rather than a box ticked in a feature list, provided you give the on-screen buttons an actual press. A reported crash bug this review couldn't reproduce, one inconsistent tutorial prompt, and the reasonable, repeated request for gamepad support keep this from a flawless score, but none of it dents what is a genuinely exceptional 13-kilobyte game. The only real asterisk is availability: play it at the developer's own site, because the author has asked, in writing, that it not be mirrored elsewhere without asking first — and that request is being honoured here.