Heh, I’m still smiling thinking about Lair of the Clockwork God. It’s so cheeky. I love how it does everything in service of a good joke. It’s even prepared to let you get the wrong idea about something so it can pull an ‘a-ha!’ moment on you later on. I’d been planning to tell the game off for something in the review until I realised it had all been a big joke and I felt silly. What a wonderful long con. I’ve never seen a game do it, not like that, nor have I seen a game bundle a separate game, a prequel, that you won’t understand the use of until you’re about half-way through the main game. It’s inspired.
Lair of the Clockwork God reviewDeveloper: Size Five GamesPublisher: Size Five GamesPlatform: Reviewed on PCAvailability: Just released on Switch (£15.49) and Xbox One (£16.74), released Feb 2020 on PC (currently discounted to £11.61 on Steam), and coming soon to PS4
Let’s recap a bit. Lair of the Clockwork God belongs to the Ben and Dan series, not that you need to be in any way aware of it to play and enjoy this. The previous games were Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentleman, Please! from about 10 years ago. They’re point-and-click adventure games which take the piss out of everything around them and they are very funny. Lair is very much like them, except Lair has a significant new concept (in addition to being much better looking): it’s both an adventure game a platformer.
This dual mechanic manifests in the game’s two characters, Ben and Dan – incidentally the name of the game’s two creators, Ben Ward and Dan Marshall (who you might know from The Swindle). Ben behaves like a character in an adventure game: he walks around interacting with objects and people, picking things up and combining them to make new items to solve puzzles. Dan, on the other hand, behaves like a platformer character: he runs and jumps around, pushing and pulling large crates. And of course, both Dan and Ben need to work together to overcome situations.
The world is built for both of them. There are areas clearly built for platforming, with spiky traps and laser beams to dodge, and there are areas clearly built for adventuring, with people to talk to and things to interact with. And as the game goes on, Ben can make new equipment for Dan, enabling him to do new things like double-jump, wall-jump, even run around blasting a riotously fun machine gun, which kills Ben, something he never fails to comment on when he respawns.