Lair of the Clockwork God Reviews
Bottomless wit and some inspired design choices make this genre mash-up a joy to play.
The kind of game you'll be quoting for years to come.
Clockwork God celebrates the tension between old and new, and finds profound comedy in the juxtaposition. It’s Size Five’s masterpiece.
Lair of the Clockwork God is a difficult one to score. What it does well is brilliant – the humour is great, with constant jokes both quickfire and slow-burn – but the gameplay is a more complex matter. While it's not bad by any reasonable metric, it is awkward in places.
Lair of the Clockwork God is a genre mash-up that probably shouldn't work, and yet it does. It feels a little unrefined, intentionally so, but there's plenty of comedic fodder in indie platformers, modern gaming and life for Ben and Dan to riff off through the lens of classic LucasArts style adventures.
Lair of the Clockwork God is an exceptional fusion of genres that can't claim to do either individually better than any other game but can certainly claim to do both simultaneously better.
Size Five offers both classic platforming and point-and-click adventuring in this self-aware and deeply anglocentric caper
Lair Of The Clockwork God is an excellent game that will take you on a hilarious journey solving puzzles with Dan and Ben, even if the journey is shorter than I would like and the jokes don't really read to anyone who isn't quite steeped within games culture.
That's not to say the gameplay isn't good. Both sides of the game are fun to play, and again, controls are well thought out, allowing you to hop between the two to make progress. Most interesting is when the duo have an effect on each other, such as crafting upgrades for Dan using Ben's inventory items. There's a lot going on here, and while it's occasionally a little clumsy, its humour and ingenuity make it a success.
With their latest, Dan Marshall and Ben Ward successfully extend their lovingly parodic style to a much broader range of genres.
Lair of the Clockwork God is funny and one of a kind, but it’s also far from perfect. It’s let down somewhat by its random bugs and lack of polish, but if you can look past them, there’s fun to be had here.
Fans of adventure games will get a big laugh out of Lair of the Clockwork God. Sadly, the platforming half of the experience is mediocre and unpolished. The experiment of Size Five Games is mostly a success with managing to find a careful balance of platforming and puzzles, but the team needed to refine the experience with tighter quality control. The writing and humour elevate theis from being average, to being worth a look towards anyone who enjoys the adventure genre.
Lair of the Clockwork God is a welcome trip off the beaten path, filled with stellar comedy and a wealth of lighthearted, enjoyable puzzles. The sum is greater than its parts, as I can easily poke holes in the platforming, but that total is still filled with goofy fun. Check out Clockwork God if you want to laugh a lot while controlling two adversarial pals in a quest to, I guess, save the world from certain dooms.
I cannot express enough how much I enjoyed this game. It does require you to be a fan of both point-and-click and platform games, but if you are, then this is an absolule diamond-studded must buy.
This is one of those titles where I'm incredibly torn on where to put it...
Hilarious and irreverent, Lair of Clockwork god if self aware and overjoys itself because of it, he dialogues and gameplay maque it a unique adventure game.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
You play with two characters in Lair of the Clockwork God: Ben and Dan. They each have different capabilities which you utilise to complete different parts of each level. Ben can interact with objects, talk to characters and craft items. He also has an inventory where he can store things that you pick up along the way. Ben can’t jump though, so he is reliant on Dan moving objects or standing on pressure pads when he needs to go up or downhill (unless there’s a gradual gradient).
We need more games like Lair of the Clockwork God, especially at a time when the world isn’t in the happiest of places. There’s enough unique, interesting, and different about this game to get you hooked, but it’s the humour that’ll keep you and make you stay to the end. Thanks for giving me something to smile about, Size Five Games. Playing this made me realise I’ve definitely not been doing enough of that this year.
Lair of the Clockwork God offers a clever blend of genres that come together nicely to make for one heck of an entertaining adventure. It’s like a jack of all trades in a way, but it’d be unfair to call it a master of none: the platforming is satisfying, the point-and-click adventuring is cleverly designed, whilst the narrative is memorable and full of silly antics. It does have a few performance issues right now that can see the platforming feeling a little sketchy in places, whilst point-and-click aficionados might be a little underwhelmed by the difficulty of the conundrums on offer. Neither of these issues stop Lair of the Clockwork God from being a whole lot of fun to play though and an easy title to recommend for Nintendo Switch gamers looking for something a little bit different.
A cohesive and complementary blend of point-and-click adventure and 2D platformer, Lair of the Clockwork God is a real rib tickler that’s capable of delivering real emotion when it aims to. This is Ben & Dan’s magnum opus and one of the most essential games of 2020.