Lair of the Clockwork God is a game I saw recommended by someone I trust on Twitter. I'd never heard of it before, but it was recommended to emphatically and I had a bit of credit on my Switch at the time that I just had to make the jump. All I really knew about it going it was that it was somehow both a platformer and a point'n'click, and even then the game routinely threw me for a loop both mechanically and narratively. It took me about 6 or 7 hours to beat the game while getting a handful of achievements along the way.

The game follows two best friends Dan and Ben on their quest to save the world from every apocalypse at once. They return from (the tutorial) trip to South America to find a flower to cure their friend's cancer, only to return to a London embroiled in apocalypses. They manage to make it underground to the lair of the titular clockwork god, a mysterious machine that has apparently been keeping these all from happening for a long time, but had suddenly gone dormant for some reason. The two friends need to go through a series of simulations to teach the computer human emotions (via their simulated experiences) so it has the empathy required to care about humanity enough to stop all of these darn apocalypses.

This is in some ways a game to make you think, but it's also definitely here for comedy. Ben is the point'n'click character while Dan is his platforming friend, and though they're quite self-aware of the fact they're in a video game, this is the rare game that is actually funny with that premise. The humor is often very adult, to a point it routinely surprised me (especially in just how sexual the humor could get), but it was still a game I enjoyed a lot. The devs clearly know their point'n'click games, as Ben feels like he walked right out of a 90's game with just what a heartless bastard he can be XD. In his own words, "I'm not a bad person. I'm immoral, or amoral. Whatever the right one is."

Gameplay-wise, the game is about 60% point'n'clck and 30% platformer and 10% other, with the first taking up more time for the pretty easy to guess reason of adventure games just taking up more time by nature of their being a puzzle. The platforming is more-often more straightforward, but can also be pretty darn challenging at times. Thankfully, there are a ton of accessibility options for the game, with "platforming assistance" being a very nice slider to turn up or down depending on how good you are at such things. The platforming is generally pretty solid (if a little floaty at times), and the point'n'click stuff is just about always solveable, and you can thankfully never leave behind any necessary items accidentally. The two systems reinforce each other in a way where Dan moves platforms for Ben to progress, and Ben commonly makes new abilities to augment Dan's platforming skills.

The two main genres the game grapples with are very compatently done, but then there's that "other" part, and I don't really wanna spoil to much of that, as it's kinda hard to describe outside of abstracts. This is a game that seems to have a lot of things that ultimately aren't what they seem, and in that way it plays with the idea of genre in lots of weird, wacky ways. There are a lot of genuine instances of "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" in terms of how the game can feel really perplexingly designed at times (though one point I did genuinely hit a bug and have to reset the console ^^;), and it's something best experienced for yourself, I think.

The presentation is really nice, having a highly detailed and well-animated pixel-ish art style, and the music is also excellent. I know I've already said this in the review, but the people who made this really know their stuff, as the point'n'click music really fits the point'n'click sections, and the platforming section music really heckin' bops as action game tunes. The Sonic parody level in particular feels like it hopped right out of some alt-universe genuine Sonic game with how fun a song it is~.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really oddball game that is a shining star among the pile of indie gold on the Switch. If you're a fan of point'n'click games, this is one you absolutely should not pass up. It's as enjoyable as it is memorable, and it's one of my favorite indie titles I've played on the Switch. The person who recommended it to me so highly had every reason to do so, and now I pass that hearty recommendation on to you~.

I was intrigued by the concept, but unfortunately Lair of the Clockwork God's marriage of 2D platformer and Point and click adventure game did not work for me. Taken on their own merit, neither the platforming, which suffers from poor controls and a lack of anything differentiating itself from thousands of other platformers, nor the adventuring, which is bog standard and filled with humor that misses more than it hits, are particularily enjoyabe.
Put together though they really bring out the worst of each other, by also adding the constant confusion and doubt on whether a particular problem is a platforming challenging you are just executing wrongly, or it's actually solved in the PnC part and you ve just wasted 15 minutes of your life trying to make this jump

As a big fan of both point-and-click adventures as well as platformers, this game seemed like the perfect fit. But while the idea of combining platformer mechanics with point-and-click adventure mechanics is certainly unique, the game struggles to bring either of those two parts to great heights. The platforming is fine but the controls are far from excellency. The point-and-click is fine and fortunately not very frustrating, but also quite linear due to the lack of options.

But ultimately I think the game is better than the sum of its parts because it gets a lot out of this premise in terms of writing. I quite enjoyed the interactions between Ben and Dan and their constant arguing about their different ways to handle problems while they fumbled their way through this crazy conspiracy story. Nice meta gags and puzzles included.

The game also had quite a variety of locations, each with unique pacing, atmosphere, and mechanics themselves. It always managed to move forward before it started to become stale to me.

I really wanted to love this and kept waiting to change my mind about it. It was mostly a tedious frustrating slog all the way through, though.

It’s rare that I’m disappointed on every level by a game like this. The most unexpected frustration was how technically broken the PS4 port seems to be. I had less play-affecting bugs with Cyberpunk near launch than with this. It’s a bad sign if I’m this often unsure if the game has busted again or it’s just another tediously implemented joke. Usually it was the game getting into a bugged state that required a quit and reload, and in the process usually losing several minutes of progress thanks to the busted checkpoint system. I also haven’t seen such long, stuttering load screens on PS4 since Bloodborne near launch. As a fun send off, the final set piece broke in three different ways, requiring a start from scratch each time.

But maybe the gameplay is fun enough to suffer through that technical mess? No, unfortunately it’s not. It’s a mix of the kind of tedious adventure game that nearly killed that genre and platforming that controls terribly despite the needlessly challenging insta-death perils everywhere. I’m not a platforming expert, but I beat Celeste without assists and found this 100x more maddening, and with none of that game’s clever level design or fun.

But maybe the writing is worth it? Still a no. There are a handful of genuinely hilarious jokes, but overall the writing goes for quantity over quality; why tell one great joke when you can think of ten mediocre ones instead? It’s also given to the sort of hat-on-a-hat type humor that thinks a character named Lord Biggles Scat-Muncher Hoppinsforth the IV is very funny. Worse is its take on irreverent fourth wall breaking; I love knowing satire that has fun deflating self-regard (e.g. The Looker’s recent skewering of The Witness) but it doesn’t work when the parody is clearly just as impressed and self-satisfied with its own genius as its target is, and even less when it’s primarily pointing out obvious, well-trod criticisms made more cleverly elsewhere.