Paws and Leaves is an unforgettable cozy Fall experience with a demo to play right now

I tend to spend a lot of time indoors, typing away at my desk and generally avoiding the outside world as much as humanly possible until I absolutely have to step outside my front door. So when a game comes along that lets me explore the wilderness without leaving my seat, I usually get hooked pretty quickly, and Paws and Leaves is no exception to that. 

Paws and Leaves is a story-driven and emotional adventure tale developed by Grownarts, and very recently received full funding during its Kickstarter campaign. You play as Me, a fox setting out on its ‘last journey’, hoping to gather up memories of a life well lived. While emotion is at the heart of this heartwarming tale, it also manages to feel like a wild fever dream, and it’s captivating. 

Overcoming the initial trauma

The first thing that happens in Paws and Leaves is a cutscene in which you get bitten by a snake, which is how Me ends up slowly dying across the main story of the game. It’s a bit of an emotional gut punch that comes very suddenly, and you’re left wandering around in the forest with a chatty (at times overly so) butterfly named Ani as your guide.

Despite this traumatizing and sad beginning, Paws and Leaves quickly becomes something much softer and whimsical. Suddenly, you’re a fox, hopping, skipping, and generally prancing around a frankly gorgeous semi-Autumnal forest. It’s incredibly easy to forget that you are marching towards your own eventual demise, 

While I was living out my best fox life, or what was left of it, I discovered that I’m terrible at hunting and, if I were a fox, I’d likely starve long before a snake could catch me on the ankle and put me on a course with death. But despite being bad at the mechanic, it never once became frustrating, which could easily have been a problem. Instead, it just felt like another message: Keep trying, you’ll get it. 

Things get a little weird

I’m not sure if the strangeness of Paws and Leaves is a hallucinated side effect of the snake’s venom running through Me’s veins, or if there is a deeper explanation, but there are apparently two completely different worlds that you can explore as this little fox. While you can run around the forest to your heart’s content, there’s also a dark and bizarre world filled with neon lights and surrealism that, at least during my playthrough of the demo, appeared very suddenly and with little explanation. 

However, there almost doesn’t need to be an explanation, although I’m sure one will eventually be revealed in the full game when it releases. The dark ‘dream’ world is stunning, especially given that the rules of the real world don’t apply here. Me can walk on water, traversing the surface while neon fish swim beneath it. It’s an otherworldly and oddly breathtaking experience.

Colorful characters

After my brief mental detour into the ‘other world’, I woke up in the forest again with Ani at my side and a choice between paths to follow. I went right, as I usually do in these scenarios, and eventually met some characters who somehow managed to change the feel of the game entirely in a short few minutes of dialogue. 

A lizard (possibly a gecko, possibly a newt) and a cat-badget-skunk put on a two-man show at the path’s eventual dead end, talking about how taking a detour and enjoying the scenery is sometimes the best choice in life. You can’t interact with them; instead, you simply watch as they talk and inject a little bit of slapstick comedy and a couple of fart jokes into proceedings. Then they disappear through the grass, and you can continue on with your adventure. 

In the version of the demo I’ve played, the spoken dialogue of Paws and Leaves is AI-generated, but it is a placeholder until actual voice actors can record lines instead. That’s a very good thing for a huge number of obvious reasons, but also one that I faced personal issues with in the demo: It’s hard to understand what some of the characters are saying. 

Ani, thankfully, has subtitles that follow her whenever she talks, which makes things a little easier. Sadly, the lizard and the skunk-cat do not share those subtitles, so a lot of the words they said were lost on me due to either volume issues, accents, or being spoken just a little bit too quickly. Not that it made me like them any less; it’s hard not to like them when they’re bickering between themselves. 

Paws and Leaves is still in development, and there’s a whole heap of things yet to come for this adorable little game, including voice actors and the addition of backers’ memories as keepsakes. There is a demo available to download and play through Steam right now, and it’s the perfect cozy, unforgettable experience for this time of year.