Lair of the Clockwork God review – a very British genre mashup - MW

In a bygone era, where our attention may last longer than a TikTok video, point-and-click adventure games from developers like Sierra Online and LucasArts have brought in funny jokes. Fun, exciting and fun for our new beige PC. These are mental taxes, long experiences often bring the brightest minds, the cutest characters and the stories that last long after the accumulation of credits.

The lair of watchmaking God always needs to find a new way for an old genre and is marginalized. But he managed to do it, by pollinating the platform - and a particularly demanding foundation.

If it sounds like a recipe for nibbling your screen through a clenched jaw, it's proof for writers - designers Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, it's a ship for creative quizzes and a particularly funny brand on design. games.

Our double protagonists Dan and Ben are a disoriented couple facing not one but several apocalypse, and they embody opposite schools of thought. Ben, studious and against modern terms, such as Craft Crafting, is the point-and-click component. Controlling it is a quiet matter between the objects of interest and interacting with them via the classic adventure game interface: watching, pushing, talking, using the inventory, combining items in the warehouse until the correct pairing . You can press the space bar anything you want, he tells you, but as the protagonist of the loyal adventure game, he won't jump.

It was just the preservation of Ben. The switching of commands gives him the impression of falling into another game. He ran in a full sprint stage, jumping over obstacles and through tears of gravity which made him fall to the top. He constantly scolds Dan for his capricious adventure in the game of obstacle resolution.

The interaction between these two is the strongest property of the lair of the mechanical God. It provides the basis of its puzzles and the nonsense that can be there. Presented with a high crest on the ground, Dan declared it insurmountable and had to call his more mobile accomplice to ensure the passage. Naturally, this involves deflating helium from the balloon of a disgraced clown, emptying his bladder at Portaloo through difficult physical manipulations and ultimately being carried on a bump. small. It is a very proficient game in the chaotic nature of in-game adventure puzzles and based on that with a wink.

It doesn't always work. While the text often appears as an authentic respondent, it occasionally enters Tryhard territory. Sometimes this duo is a touch too ready to point out that this is a game you play, and Aren's stupid game?

It works when they explain deus ex machinas and keeps everything going - repeated use and more and more useless for the battery that leaks every time - but less when Ben and Dan just play show all the observations. The last thing you want in your 14th attempt in a tiring dance sequence is a wilt in modern life

Getting stuck comes with the territory. It’s a rite of passage in any adventure game, let alone one with a constantly escalating platformer component: here’s a double-jump! Now here’s a sprint! And you might as well take this gun, too. Use them all in a demanding platform sequence, why don’t you?

But if you’re going to get stuck, it might as well be at the hands of a mind-bending sequence of jumps and gravity shifts instead of – as in the olden days – Byzantine puzzling. Lair of the Clockwork God strikes an impressive balance between its two mashup genres, mechanically and tonally. It’s a post-ironic take on point-and-clicks rather than a dewy-eyed nostalgia trip, and better for it.

MW