Lair Of The Clockwork God
Platformer meets point-and-click as Ben and Dan return
PC
Two years in development but a decade in the making, Lair Of The Clockwork God is a return to the genre with which Size Five Games first made its name – or, more accurately, its previous name, Zombie Cow Studios. Just don’t call it a comeback. “I know it feels like we’re going back to point-andclicks,” Dan Marshall tells us. “But in a lot of ways I never really left them.”
That said, it’s now been 11 years since Marshall and co-creator and writing partner Ben Ward brought us pay-what-you-want adventure Ben There, Dan That, while sequel Time Gentlemen, Please celebrates its tenth anniversary this month. Since then, Marshall has worked on the Channel-4-funded edutainment game Privates, the underrated one-on-one shooter Gun Monkeys, steampunk stealth Roguelike The Swindle and football parody Behold The Kickmen. “I think I need to go away and do different things, I need that creative space,” he says. “If I’d made adventure games solidly for my entire indie career, I’d have gone potty by now.”
Marshall and Ward have been discussing a third Ben and Dan game ever since the second launched. The two former classmates might now be on other sides of the country, but they still meet up every so often for a beer and a chat, usually with a pad and pen handy. “We’ve been talking about stupid jokes and silly puzzles until the whole thing has come together.” The game itself isn’t far off being done, but the script is; by the time you read this Marshall and Ward will have returned from a week-long retreat at a log cabin, where the bulk of the dialogue will have been written and the puzzles fine-tuned.
The game itself has taken longer to figure out – Marshall suggests the pair have gone back to the drawing board twice already. The debut trailer bullishly declares it ‘a reinvention of the point-and-click genre’, but that seems a playful exaggeration; it is, Marshall says, more about identifying (and fixing) what’s stopped him from enjoying adventure games lately – namely keeping “the amount of dawdling” to a minimum. “There’s always a bit where you wrap up a big series of puzzles,” he says. “And the next act gives you a big new area to explore. I feel like
“We’ve been talking about stupid jokes until the whole thing has come together”
if you had metrics on those games, that’s where people stop playing. There’s a bit in one of the Monkey Island games where you get to a new island and there’s like eight shops with eight shopkeepers in and a jail. And I’ve got to talk to all these people and go around all these environments before I know what I’m supposed to be doing.”
The solution has been to keep the action more tightly focused by adopting a structure
more akin to a platform game, with a central hub world from which you can access various self-contained stages. You’ll be able to swap between the two characters: Marshall’s alterego fancies himself a platforming hero, using power-ups (from double-jump trainers to a wall-grab) that Ben has combined in his inventory. “It means you don’t have to worry whether you picked up that item three screens ago or backtrack to the 18 locations you’ve unlocked so far. You know that everything you need is directly in front of you, and that just keeps everything so much snappier.”
It also means he and Ward can write gags about the indie-platformer boom. “We hit upon the idea of turning it into a platformer a long time ago, when all of the jokes were going to be about Sonic and Mario. But then Braid happened, Super Meat Boy and all that,” he says. “Celeste,” he adds with extra emphasis, suggesting there’s more where the trailer’s nods to ‘worthy quests’ and ‘talking about feelings’ came from. But as with the previous two Ben and Dan games, he insists there won’t be any punching down, and any jabs are self-deprecating anyway. “We’re making fun of something that the game already is – and, of course, we’ve got all the same old pointand-click jokes.” He laughs. “Now it’s been ten years, I don’t mind making them again.”