Lair of the Clockwork God
How appropriate, you platform like a cow
BEN AND DAN, dual protagonists of ClockworkGod, 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 TheLostVikings 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 more 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 to an 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 Clock work 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.