Lair of the Clockwork God
Management only fear the elder gods and the taxman, Chris Schiling is neither, so he’s been sent off to the content mines to dig up some words.
Chris Schiling chuckles, snickers and guffaws his way through a comedic indie title that successfully mashes up platforming with pointing ‘n’ clicking.
Genuinely funny games are still something of a rarity. So without wishing to dismiss or overlook the structural ingenuity and genre fluidity of a game that fuses a traditional point-and-click adventure with a modern indie platform-puzzler, the highest praise we can give Lair of the Clockwork God is simply that it made us laugh solidly from start to finish. Its central pair – the witheringly sarcastic alter-egos of creator Dan Marshall and co-writer Ben Ward – deliver gags with a seriously good hit rate.
The third game in the Ben and Dan series, belatedly following 2008 freeware debut Ben There, Dan That! and 2009 sequel Time Gentlemen, Please!, opens in a Peruvian jungle, where it establishes its central hook. Ben remains dedicated to the combinational arts of the point-and-click, whereas Dan has decided to reinvent himself as a contemporary indie platformer hero, on a touching and emotional mission to recover a possibly metaphorical flower that can cure cancer.
What follows is an imaginative journey that involves plenty of character-swapping as you make use of their disparate skill-sets. Dan can reach places his noodlelegged counterpart can’t, while Ben can pick up and combine objects to help his bouncy BFF, including creating a few power-ups – the method of obtaining the sticky gloves that give Dan the ability to wall-grab is one of several lowbrow highlights.
Though the game smartly avoids the irritating pixelhunts of many a classic point-and-click, the platforming does create a few extra sticking points. Giving Ben a piggyback as Dan speeds up your movement, but it’s possible to overlook key environmental features or objects unless you periodically drop him off. You’re not always confined to a small locality, nor will you always be aware of which character you should be controlling. Such moments are rare, thankfully, and the dialogue tends to subtly seed clues and hints—though there are a few occasions where you’ll find yourself trying out every possible combination of objects in your inventory.
Somehow, this stuff hardly matters. It helps that Dan’s glee during the platforming set-pieces is surprisingly infectious. Besides, any minor annoyances are quickly forgotten when you’re rarely more than a minute or two from a pun, a snarky one-liner or a sight gag.
Laughs a-plenty
Its sense of humour might be too caustic for some, and its penchant for gross-out won’t sit well with others. Yet the tone is usually either cheeky, affectionate or both. As often as Lair of the Clockwork God mocks it actively celebrates the kind of games it’s joking about, too.
At times, it feels as if Marshall and Ward are throwing as much as they can at the wall to see what sticks – and much of it does. There’s a great section that interrogates the process of respawning. One chapter, where the two need to impress a social media feed of youngsters to enter a club, risks devolving into condescending references to young people and their weird lingo, but defies expectations with a self-aware twist.