I feel like the old fashioned point and click adventure is a dangerously under-represented breed of game these days. There are precious few developers even attempting the genre, and those that do, even while producing a fun, quality game, seem to lack the resources to keep their narrative full of puzzles for any significant length of time. Originally released in 2009, Total Eclipse Games this month brought their take on the tried and true point and click to the Steam platform, and thus The Clockwork Man tosses its mechanized chapeau in the ring.

Gameplay

Anyone familiar with point and click adventures will be immediately at home in The Clockwork Man. You are given a vantage point looking upon a room, where some items in that room are a part of your quest, and thus clickable. This game consists of screens completely littered with objects of all variety in different settings, and tasks you to hunt through this clutter. In fact, this clutter is so bad, by the end of the game I believed A&E should do a special episode of Hoarders about the cast. While older point and clicks are just as much about exploring the available real estate as they are puzzle solving and story, The Clockwork Man instead features relatively few “set-pieces” and maintains control over which ones you can visit every step of the way. These scenes come in three types: static (a single screen to hunt on), zoomable (where there are actually two different layers to the scene, and you can toggle between them), and panning (where the scene is actually built of various levels which parallax as you pan across). I actually found the parallax panning scenes the most interesting, because items could be hidden behind things closer to the camera until you panned out of the way.

There are also puzzles, where you must take items obtained from the gopher tasks and combine them in the proper manner with the scene itself, such as patching a broken pipe with a sheet of metal and a hammer. Unfortunately, the actual puzzles are few and far between, and it is in the game’s other play mode that the bulk of The Clockwork Man as a game differs from the familiar. Most of the game you are given lists of items and asked to pick them out of the scene by clicking on them. While it’s possible to hunt down items with some sharp eyes, I sometimes found myself resorting to spam clicking the scene, hoping to get lucky.

On the other hand, The Clockwork Man features a very handy and forgiving hint system. The main character’s robot companion can locate items for you, if you’re absolutely stumped, or you can just ask him for a picture of a specific item, to just give you a leg up. What I liked about the hint system though, is that the little robot required “charges” be spent on these hints, and his pool of charges is limited, but also regenerates slowly over time, giving you ample hints should you so need them.

All this clicking and puzzling is draped in the fairly simple story of a girl attempting to find her lost grandfather, and bring him a series of items he requested. This of course, is accomplished by finding said items in the scattered piles of stuff you’ll be looking at extensively. Setting the game in a steampunk world gives it a bit of flavor, but I found the possibilities of the setting mostly unused. You take an airship ride, and you have a robot companion built by your ridiculously smart grandfather, but beyond using it to mask the hint system by calling them “upgrades” to your robot, I wish they could have made better use of the fantastic setting.

All that said, the game turns out to be incredibly short. Looking at my Steam account, I see that I spent a total of 1.9 hours playing through the campaign. While the actual puzzles did get my gray matter working on an enjoyable level, there was disappointingly few of them. The vast majority of the game is the of the “clickie-clickie find the 6 tiny bolts in the mess” variety. If there had been more actual puzzles interspersed, with the same amount of hunting stages, I would have been much, much happier with the game.

Audio/Visual

The art of The Clockwork Man consists of very pretty hand painted set pieces and characters. Fans of the clockwork and steampunk aesthetics will definitely find a few points of interest here. But its the clutter of objects that really stands out in the artwork. I imagine the task of drawing all the intricacies of the scenes and the objects to be found therein must have been tremendous. But it was well worth it, as the clutter gives everything its own sort of charm.

The dialogue is also fully voice acted, and very professional sounding. The voice acting definitely helped to draw me into the world, as did the music which fits the game quite well, in a whimsically classical way.SummaryAll told, I was moderately amused by the Clockwork Man. I loved the setting and the art, but the gameplay and length were of some disappointment to me. I suppose I could say I enjoyed it in the same way I still enjoy a copy of Highlights Magazine, because The Clockwork Man is mostly just a series of “find the object” hunt puzzles. If you’re looking for a leisurely casual gaming experience, or have a child who likes their Highlights, you could probably get quite a bit out of The Clockwork Man. Especially with the random placement of items on each subsequent playthrough, and the randomly generated stages for a quick hit.

Summary