Lair Of The Clockwork God
PC
Within minutes of starting Size Five’s latest we steal a dead man’s shoes. That is far from the worst thing to happen to a corpse in the third Dan and Ben game, which is as scorchingly rude and abrasively funny as its predecessors. But don’t expect a conventional point-and-click adventure this time. Designer and co-writer Dan Marshall’s in-game alter ego has decided, in his desire to stay relevant, to become an “indie darling platformer”, and that the two must embark upon a “poignant quest”. Ben, however, is keen to stick to tried-and-tested techniques: talking to people, picking up objects, and occasionally combining two of them. The pair reach a compromise on the latter: Dan insists that, in keeping with modern gaming parlance, it must be called ‘crafting’. It may have been more than a decade since Time, Gentleman Please, but as these two bicker their way through this ambitious hybrid, it’s clear neither has really grown up. Good.
Still, for a while we’re concerned that this crosspollination of genres might not quite come together. The controls are a recurring issue – the need to accommodate platform-puzzler and point-and-click in a single interface leads to moments where you need to hold the D-pad and the right analogue stick simultaneously to select actions for Ben. And at first, the puzzles revolve around a familiar idea, as you use Dan’s sprightliness to clear a way for his less agile friend. Ben, for his part, combines – sorry, crafts – objects that become abilities for Dan, such as a double-jump, while pulling levers that Dan’s meaty fingers can’t grasp. Ben’s slow walk seems like it might be a problem, though after a while you can use Dan to give him a piggyback. And just as you’re thinking even this might be too much of a faff, another ability arrives that makes getting around much easier.
Any minor hiccups are forgiven thanks to the dialogue, which sneaks in exposition and instruction under the guise of flippancy and toilet humour. Dan and Ben’s verbal jousting jogs your memory about objectives and key items you might have picked up a while back and haven’t used yet. They’ll sometimes act as an extra pair (or two) of eyes, nodding towards critical items and environmental features you might’ve overlooked. That’s easier done than you might think – while piggybacking, you might hurry by an object you didn’t know you could interact with. It pays to slow down where possible, then, not least because missing something almost certainly means skipping a gag. Occasionally – if not quite often enough for our liking – their exchanges double as a more direct in-built hint system. If you seem to have exhausted all avenues, then simply stopping and chatting might nudge you in the right direction.
And if not, you’ll get a laugh from the exchange nonetheless. Much of the humour here centres on Dan and Ben’s clash of tastes, which results in a series of jabs at other games. The gags aren’t specific enough to feel like they’re hurting anyone, yet Ben in particular mercilessly rips into current indie trends and traits. It’s sometimes affectionate – there are clear nods to Celeste, extending to some inventively tricky platforming sequences, which become all the more delightful in light of Dan’s boundless exuberance for his new-found agility. He’s even pleased when his jumping ability is removed, during a sequence that amounts to a walking-simulator simulator, and enraptured by pretentious passages of floating text that Ben dismisses as “disparate chunks of waffle”. So yes, there’s a dig at how we critics write about these games, too – safe to say, we may need to extend our banned-words list.
All of this could so easily fall into sneering cynicism, but when it’s poking fun at “platformers about feelings” you can hardly say it’s punching down, when that’s what it is in a very literal sense: after the opening, the story takes a turn for the apocalyptic and the two end up as subjects in a series of tests based on human emotions as an AI harvests their data in the hope of saving humanity. And when it isn’t engaging in playful (self-) mockery, it finds ways to explore videogames’ strange quirks in witty, insightful fashion. An extended riff on the procedure of respawning imagines a layer of bureaucracy between death and rebirth (“No wonder platformers are so emo if they have to go through that every two minutes,” Ben grumbles) while finding room for a wonderful Jurassic Park joke.
Only occasionally are we reminded that platformers aren’t Marshall’s wheelhouse, with one or two annoyingly fussy sections. Then again, checkpoints are generous enough that any frustration is fleeting – well, outside the chapter where exasperation is intentional, which results in a barrage of in-game swearing that hits embarrassingly close to home. This is just one of several ingenious comic set-pieces. An unlikely perspective shift becomes an amusing excuse to gaslight the player. The Disappointment chapter is a brief but wonderful subversion of a videogame cliché. That common developer maxim ‘it’s not a bug, it’s a feature’ is referenced in a barnstorming late-game payoff, while a punchline to a seemingly callous running joke left us unsure whether to groan or applaud. And typically, the Grief chapter, certainly for those with a more twisted sense of humour, is probably the funniest of the lot.
The surprises keep coming in a game that occasionally buckles under the weight of its ambitions, built as it is upon slightly unsteady foundations. Yet it’s hard to mind. There’s a sense that Marshall is taking a bold swing for the fences in the knowledge that this could well be his studio’s last game. We can only hope that Lair Of The Clockwork God finds the audience it deserves, but if this really is the end, then at least Ben and Dan have gone out on a hilarious high.
When it isn’t engaging in playful (self-) mockery, it finds ways to explore videogames’ quirks in witty, insightful fashion