How appropriate, you platform like a cow
Lair of the Clockwork God
BEN AND DAN, dual protagonists of
Clockwork God, have been through two
games before, classic point-and-clickers
in the LucasArts mold. This time around,
though, while Ben sticks to following the
pointer and combining objects with words,
Dan has decided to reinvent himself as a
character from a platform game.
Ben and Dan are also the names of the
writers and developers of the game, and
if you’re a fan of fourth-wall-breaking,
raised eyebrows, and ironic self-insertion,
there’s a lot of that here to please you,
especially if you played a game in the
’90s. Appropriately, despite its modern
trappings, the game Lair most closely
resembles is The Lost Vikings from 1993,
in the way you switch between characters
with differing abilities to solve puzzles.
Unlike other dual-protagonist games,
such as Kalimba, however, Ben and
Dan move independently and frequently
interact. Their newly divergent natures,
though, lead to a control system that’s
neither one thing nor the other—
one character who favors mouse and
keyboard, and another who’s better
suited to a gamepad. They’re even drawn
differently, with Ben’s lankiness somehow
appropriate for his role in using objects
and turning levers, while Dan’s morean ancient computer, that’s lightened by
some wonderfully puerile lines, swearing,
penis jokes, social media in-jokes, and
a few references to the authors’ British
childhoods that may go over many heads.
Lair of the Clockwork God is many
things: Both an adventure and a
platformer, it’s also a bromance, a wry
commentary on gaming as you get older,
and something very funny indeed. There
are points when it doesn’t really work,
and moments when you wonder if you’re
meant to be laughing but have missed a
subtle joke, but otherwise it is a pleasure
to play. If we were still in high school, we’d
be quoting lines from it back and forth
with our friends, and you can’t praise it
any more highly than that. –IAN EVENDENIf you want to gauge the level
of humor, Ben's bladder is
part of his inventory.hunched appearance makes him look like
Sonic charging up a spin attack.VERBS AND PICTURES
What this means in practice is that while
Ben can walk in straight lines and interact
with objects and characters through the
familiar bank of verbs, he gets stopped
by even the slightest wall or jump. Dan,
meanwhile, can only run and jump,
blasting through some areas like a pinball
champ. He can give Ben the odd lift,
but most of the time when the pair are
separated, it’s only so they can find a way
to come back together again through the
kind of lateral thinking that went out of
style at the turn of the millennium. The
pixel-art style scales beautifully up to 4K,
however, and the minimum spec GPU is 14
years old. It seems built with integrated
graphics in mind, the sort of thing you can
throw on a laptop after work for a chuckle
as you decompress.
And yes, there are a lot of chuckles.
Genuinely funny games are pretty rare,
and this is the first to really earn that
accolade since Amanita Design’s Chuchel,
back at the beginning of 2019. There’s a
very dry strain of humor on display here,
however, as Ben and Dan face getting
older and explain the idea of feelings toLair of the Clockwork God
ADVENTURE A fun tale with
likeable characters; writing that
will keep you laughing.
PLATFORMER Occasional control
problems and points at which you feel
lost by the wordplay.
RECOMMENDED SPECS 2.4GHz or more
CPU; 4GB RAM; GeForce 8800.
$20, http://www.sizefivegames.com, ESRB: Not rated8
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