Lair of the Clockwork God

The game's gimmick works quite well - the platforming and the puzzling are well integrated together. The platforming can get a bit frustrating at times (inverted gravity... ugh), but platform assist can be turned on if really needed. Writing is very clever. I normally don't love it when videogame characters are aware of being in a videogame, but in this game the writers really stick to it and it works. I also liked the commentary on some pretentious indie platformers out there...

i bought the game because I was curios to see how these two game genres would work together - and the devs managed to combine them in really creative ways. But for me this game was not fun to play because I heard the devs evil laughs all the time while playing - they made a lot of the platforming and some of the puzzles as infuriating as possible, So I was glad to finish the game and to not have to play it ever again. The humor was not my cup of tea either, but the banter can be sped up, so that's ok. I also used the platform assist option at the end of the game to protect my computer from harm - some platforming levels are INFURIATING and I didn't want to take it out on my poor laptop. So - if you have masochistic tendencies and like a challenge - go for it :-))

I loved Ben There, Dan That & Time Gentlemen, Please! They were lovely adventure game throwbacks that captured the old 90s charm. I will briefly say what I liked about LotCG before diving into why it is mostly dreadful. Some of the dialogue can be laugh out loud funny. The Alien Spaceship is by far the best portion of the game. The meta-commentary often works. The adventure puzzles were for the most part okay if not bordering on too easy. Now the bad. I'll start with the easy stuff. The game runs terribly for what is essentially pixel art. The FPS drops to the 10s when you fire the gun during platforming sections. The game isn't very nice looking to have this kind of issue. I experienced frequent softlocks requiring restarts. The game tried to make controllers and keyboards work, and incidentally neither do. The platforming is horrendous compared to dedicated platformers. There's an intentional in game "glitch" that is terribly obnoxious but left intentionally as a kind of meta-joke that is later used to solve a puzzle. That the player is not made aware the glitch is intentional makes this puzzle all the more obtuse and was the moment I went from tolerating the game to actively hating it. Now the trickier bit. LotCG wants to be smarter than it is. The first 2 games were just two British chaps bumbling out and quipping. It worked well. LotCG wants to be a social critique, and it does this critique by just "stating" their critique rather than infusing it intelligently into the game. Worse, they can't help but dive into the culture wars and drag out Brexiteers in an extremely terribly segment that has no business in what I thought was a playful adventure game. Their stereotyping of Brexiteers (and earlier chavs) is made all the worse when earlier in the game they start virtue signaling about being feminists and against racism. It's hypocrisy writ large by smug video game programmers, and the developers become stereotypes themselves. What a tragedy.

In the first minutes of the game, one of the main characters uses "hippie" as a pejorative and have you kill one of them. I guess it's supposed to be edgy and/or appeal to those knuckle-dragging gamers out there. Reminds me of Breathedge's "Mr. Sort-of-Libtard". Personally, I just find such "humor" revolting.