Clockwork Calamity is a charming platformer/adventure game, with a big world to discover, mushrooms to collect and lots of people to meet along the way. It’s a collaboration between Sylvie (of Cat Planet) and hubol (of Super Bogus World).
It’s a very untraditional platformer, where the main mechanic is that you, uh, bounce dramatically off walls when you even slightly brush against them. So, movement becomes this super deliberate thing, where sometimes you’re carefully trying to avoid bumping into walls as you move around, then other times, you’re using walls on purpose to propel yourself forward to reach awkward places. I can’t think of another game that feels like this!
The platforming is pretty fun, but the real heart of Clockwork Calamity is actually its “trading” system. Every character in the game has a bag of useful things – they’ll trade you for mushrooms, which you can find in special platformy (procedurally generated?) Mushroom Zones, or for other items. So, the majority of the game is spent trying to trade your way up to crucial key items (the clock hands) by figuring out what people want. I guess it’s a little bit like the 8-bit Dizzy games? But, a lot more interesting than that!
I feel like the thing the platforming and trading and everything else in the game has in common is that it’s… like, going against the grain. You can see it in every system in the game, a choice made deliberately to make it less familiar, more textured, more interesting. Like, you could have made the trading work by just literally telling you what items you needed to find, and then swapping them out for the new thing when you talked to the NPC. Instead, they did something way cooler.
It’s worth mentioning that until very recently, this was a paid game – the creators decided to make it available for free in the hopes that it would reach some new people. I hope it does – I like it a lot.
This game is so good! I got the Canyon Cliffs theme stuck in my head just by looking at the screenshot.