Lair of the Clockwork God Review

My two favourite genres of game have always been platformers and point-and-click adventure games. This is mainly because of my long-documented penchant for getting lost in less linear games. There was that time I got lost for a little while in Sonic Mania, but we don’t talk of that. The point is that Lair of the Clockwork God is a glorious mash-up of two genres. But is it a “peanut butter and chocolate” combination or more of a “sausages and jam” kind of affair?

You don’t need to have played the earlier games, but if you’re already familiar with the Ben and Dan series, then you’ll know to expect off-the-wall humour with the occasional crude joke, and a lot of self-referential jokes. What you might not be expecting is Dan’s decision to leave the world of point-and-click adventures behind in favour of becoming a fancy indie darling platformer. Ben, on the other hand, is staunchly stuck in the world of adventuring, refusing to even jump unless Dan carries him. 

These two intrepid adventurers have found themselves, as you do, in the midst of the apocalypse, and their only hope is to help teach the titular Clockwork God about human emotion. You do this by making your way through various levels themed around emotions, all of which feature a blend of the two different genres in varying proportions. 

Throughout the game you’ll be using the abilities of both characters in order to solve puzzles, with some supremely ingenious twists along the way. You’ll want to engage in a bit of lateral thinking for a few of them, with some particularly clever techniques used for providing solutions, including one “game within a game” puzzle that sees you switching to play a visual novel for a bit in order to get the information you need to complete a level.

It’s a mix that shouldn’t really work, as the two styles are very disparate, but it’s surprisingly effective and this is testament to some really excellent design work on show. Of course, it does mean that you will need to be a fan of the two genres to fully enjoy it, but that is to be expected. The whole really is greater than the sum of the parts here though, and the two styles of play complement each other far better than you would expect. 

The platforming sections are very fast-paced and there’s a lot going on, especially in the later game. As you progress, you gain more skills such as wall jumping and the ability to switch the direction of gravity. It leads to a lot of twitchy finger jumps that require a good deal of precision to get through. These are interspersed nicely with the more serene point-and-click sections that see our heroes using the brains rather than their brawn. 

There are more videogame tropes referenced than you can shake a stick at, with Ben and Dan’s acerbic digs being aimed at everything from their own earlier games to Twitter account “Can you pet the dog” (you can, but it’s incredibly difficult to do so). It’s never mean though, just the kind of sarcastic humour that you would expect from a game of this type. It does get a little rude in parts, so if you’re looking for something family-friendly, this isn’t it. That’s not to say that it’s particularly explicit, just be aware that some of the humour isn’t suitable for a younger audience. It was suitable for me however, and I genuinely laughed out loud at multiple points whilst playing. Comedy is hard to get right in a game but Lair of the Clockwork God nails it in a way that very few have ever done.

The graphical style is a bit different to Size Five’s previous games. It’s got a retro pixel-art feel to it, rather than the more stylised drawing of Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen Please. With the levels taking on different forms depending on the task at hand, this also means that it can vary in design. There are futuristic looking levels set inside spacecraft, but equally there is a super-colourful level that sees you shooting the candy out of a piñata. It’s a great mix, and manages to look both new and old at the same time (which I guess is the point).

If you’re not a fan of fast platformers like Super Meat Boy or VVVVVV, or you just don’t like point-and-click adventures, then you might not like this. But for everyone else, this is a game that hammers home all the best elements of two very different genres and comes out all the more polished for it. This is one of the very best titles that I’ve played in a long while and I thoroughly recommend it.