Wednesday 6 July 2016

Dealing with backlog: Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink

Clockwork Tales is a steampunk point-and-click game that I bought at the Steam Summer Sale last year. I really like point-and-click games, although they have been known to drive me temporarily insane when I don't understand what I have to do next.

The story of the game is pretty simple. A professor is investigating some mysterious tremors, earthquake-like tremors, and he gets into trouble. He sends a letter to his protegé who arrives in the town just before he is captured, and you spend the rest of the game playing as this protegé trying to rescue the professor as well as stopping the evil plans of the mastermind who's behind the tremors.

Ever since I was little and played Freddi Fish I've enjoyed games where I pick up seemingly random items from anywhere which will be important at a location at a later time. Going through my inventory and trying to figure out which items could fit where is a lot of fun. But my favourite thing in this game were the many hidden object puzzles, where you zoom in on a place and are presented with a mess of things. In the bottom are either silhouetted icons of the items you need to find in the mess, or a list of the items.
Examples of hidden object puzzles

The other puzzles were a bit more time-consuming and I admit that I used a guide for most of them. I've done a lot of point-and-click by now and after looking over the puzzle I can usually tell quite easily if this is one I can solve on my own without much trouble or if I'll need help before long. It's my safety mechanism to not go temporarily insane. I'd rather have a guide telling me what to do than staring at the screen feeling stupid.
Examples of puzzles. These are the ones I found pictures of, and these are also ones I managed without help.

The cutscenes were nice and the voice-acting was very good for a simple point-and-click. The cutscenes felt like watching cartoon shorts.

The only thing that really bugged me was that it was so short. I thought it'd be around 8-10 hours long, but instead I was done after 4½ hours. That's basically the only complaint I have. I wish it could've been longer.

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