As a teen, I had this unnecessary job at the town pool where I kept track of attendance by clicking a silver counter when people came in. When it was slow, I’d entertain myself by noting what number the clicker was on and then clicking back around to it. Despite the similarities, Clickolding, a new game by Strange Scaffold, is very much not like that.
In Clickolding, you play as a person meeting a guy in a mask in a dingy room. You need money, and the guy will give you money if you click a clicker 10,000 times. He talks, you listen, sometimes you move around on his orders, and you click.
Putting aside the embarrassment of how long it took me to get the wordplay of the title when the game was first announced, there’s clearly meant to be something sexual about the encounter, but the game isn’t prurient or judgmental about what’s brought both of you to this room, the way transactional encounters like this are often treated in games. The vibe is mostly unsettling: the guy’s weird mask, the way he asks you to come closer or move where you can’t see him, the way his dialogue grows introspective or menacing. If you, like me, are a horror wuss, it’s not scary in any traditional sense, but the tension definitely ratchets up the closer you get to 10,000. It’s a short game, taking me about an hour, and as such I won’t spoil much of what happens in it for you, since that not-knowing is key to the vibe the game is going for.
The fact that you have a goal to reach on the clicker is a good choice, the sense of a looming ending giving some structure to what could otherwise be a game about giving yourself a repetitive stress injury. You could experiment with the clicker, going faster or slower or stopping to see what the guy will do. You could invent a backstory for your character, or fill in the gaps about the guy and his attachment to this clicker. Because I am this sort of person, I had some small existential crises as I clicked, thinking about the nature of clicker games and the fact that really all my PC games are clicker games, and is all this clicking going to break my mouse and do PC mice have a lifespan based on clicks, and is clicking buttons how I should be spending my life. I don’t think this was the wrong way to approach Clickolding; despite the small room the game takes place in, there’s a real sense of roominess between the slim narrative and the one mechanic, letting you fill it with whatever you bring to the experience.
It seems like there’s more bubbling under the game’s straightforward surface–I was delighted to see players already spinning theories in the Steam forums, or devising strategies for clicking or going for records. Strange Scaffold makes weird games, but they’re also deeply specific, doing their thing for exactly as long as they need to. It feels like an antidote to our age of sprawling live-service: an odd little game that’s just trying to be what it is, and totally worth your time (but maybe do some hand stretches first).
