Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World: What would you do if the time stopped ticking? Reviews

Lovely and charming! The weird, bouncy platforming takes a bit of getting used to, but you get upgrades which make it much easier. Also the hint shops are a nice way of avoiding you getting stuck.

clockwork calamity is a very strange and deeply amusing game. i've played a few of sylvie's other platformer games and really enjoyed "jiggly zone" but nothing prepared me for for this consider a "metroidvania" type game, you know very well which parts of the world you cant get to yet. you figure out the intended path by trial and error to see where you can even get to, and then you get items that let you get to places you couldn't before. when you get new items they have a very clear purpose and quantitatively improve your movement thru the world clockwork calamity is the chaotic antithesis to the metroidvania. it is an anti-precision platformer. items you find sometimes let you get to new areas, if you can navigate the floaty bouncy movement of your character. i traded for some springshoes that let me scale every part of world but most areas were impossible to actually explore with them because of the ridiculous momentum throwing me into walls which would bounce me all over the screen the other major chaotic element of this game's mechanics is in the inventory. it's very much the sticker system in super smash bros brawl, you have to move the irregularly shaped items to fit around each other in a boxed-in space. but that's not all, any item that changes your movement abilities is always active while in your inventory. if you have say, springshoes on you cant just turn them off while exploring dangerous zones, you have to keep them on or leave them on the ground and risk losing them. a common feature of early desktop computer adventure games was that you could just throw away an item on accident and softlock the game. clockwork calamity lets you do this on purpose and it makes a point of letting you know that this is intentional i had a lot of fun with clockwork calamity but in the end i was simply too frustrated to finish it. still, i deeply respect it as a piece of art and i can tell a lot of love and effort went into creating its unique and captivating atmosphere and feel. the rough pixely mspaint graphics are incredibly charming and i laughed quite a few times talking with the cast of npcs. i want everyone that can fully appreciate this game to be able to find it because there is a lot here to love, even if that wasn't the case for me

Everything I've played of Sylvie's has been gold, this included. The inventory and trading system is delightful, and the platforming/delving system means you end up with these really unique and cool relationships to the levels. I will warn people that the platforming controls are very much not in line with mainstream thought on game feel, and that if you come into this with strong pre-assumptions on how platformers are supposed to work you will be very frustrated, but every unorthodox quality the game has is used super well and makes for an extremely memorable game. Easily one of the coolest games I've played this year

Wonderful fresh game! Exploring the world, learning about what people had/wanted, and interacting with the best inventory management system I've seen kept me hooked for the ~10 hours I played before beating it. I don't usually take notes/draw maps for games but this one really made me want to in a good way. The platforming is very goofy and surprising: you bounce off walls automatically. You can use that to ricocheting upwards and reach things you couldn't otherwise. However, as often as your aversion to walls is helpful, it can also be something to fight against when you just want to stop moving but your momentum carries you from wall to wall. It's such a neat take on platforming and that's not even dealing with the items like the bouncy shoes that help you get even higher but good luck stopping or getting into a one block high space with them! Then there's the way you throw items out of your inventory, many of which you can ride on and use to bounce in a more controller way. Everything combines into really engaging movement mechanics. The only negative for me is that this game makes the quick launcher for steam really wide lol.

One of my favorite gaming experiences this year, and in a long time! Such a unique and wonderful little game and world to explore, with tons of cute and quirky characters to meet and help. It had me smiling the whole time, and I had the adorable lyrics stuck in my head for days after finishing it. (and happily humming and singing along) It also has some really unique and fun mechanics that I haven't really seen in a platformer like this before. Definitely recommended if you want something different and cute. Thank you Sylvie and Hubol, for such a delightful and memorable experience. <3

It's a Sylvie game so it's good. You don't know what a Sylvie game is? Go play JigglyZone. What you will find in her games is cheerful visuals, honest vibes and weird ways to interact with her worlds that often challenge our gaming conventions while being surprisingly well designed and thoughtful. Clockwork Calamity is all that and delivers unusual ways to navigate her world that need to be mastered first and completely exploited later while also implementing a near-OCD-inducing inventory management that requires pixel perfect precision to fit all the stuff that you'll need to carry with you to trade and get the objects needed to restore time and beat the game. This is a very good game. Good job and thanks Sylvie and Hubol!

This game's title is as hilariously long as the game is really cool. A lot of puzzles and things are doable in a variety of different ways, which I really like! There are also plenty of ways to move through the world, and a lot of the fun for me came from just choosing whatever way I liked. There are also a ton of other things I liked, these are just two things I chose but there are plenty more really.

Has some very unique ideas. A lot of it is about pixel-perfect inventory management, trading with characters, remembering who wants what and figuring out how to get it. Since items never disappear, you can just drop them in the world and pick them up at a later time, this kind of makes the world an extension of your inventory, you just have to remember where you dropped what. Something you'll do often is re-arranging your inventory to fit just "one more thing" into it, which I found quite engaging. Upgrades just being another item in your bag really creates a nice dynamic where you have to make trade-offs and e.g. decide to sacrifice inventory space for a double jump. I would have loved if there would have been even more weirdly shaped objects and even more objects with strange effects to deliver. The music is catchy, but can get repetitive quickly. However you'll be moving between zones quite frequently so this is rarely a problem. There is a bit of reading front-loaded, but once you start the game proper you can explore to your hearts content. After the initial hurdle of figuring out where to get mushrooms and how to trade, it starts to feel quite natural interacting with the world. There is a lot to keep track of, so it can be overwhelming, but there are optional hints you can buy, if you get stuck. These hints helped me get through the last few puzzles I couldn't solve myself. I only encountered one bug where an item would come to rest exactly in front of an NPC and it was impossible to pick it up again, because it would always talk to the NPC instead. Thankfully this didn't happen with any important items. Overall, if you love to see some fresh ideas on item management and exploring an open world, can't go wrong with this.

Cool, what a bunch of great ideas, how fun to play. You might be sitting there thinking, "What is this, I'm not going to play a game that looks like it was drawn in paint." Stop Stop thinking that Swallow your pride for a second and just enjoy a unique experience.

This is a really unique and fun game! Historically, I've always been a big fan of metroidvanias, but it is definitely a genre which suffers from a lack of originality. I'm so used to exploring a world, getting a double jump, then a wall jump, then a dash, fighting bosses, etc... While it is a very compelling structure for a game, it's an extremely stagnant genre. The last 10 metroidvanias I've played are all basically interchangable. This game, on the other hand, definitely isn't like that! Every part of it feels unique. And I don't just mean the presentation, I mean the gameplay. The controls are very unique-- your character bounces off walls instead of stopping when you hit them, and while it is pretty simple to understand, it takes a long time to really wrap your head completely around the physics, and so the biggest barrier to you moving forward is your own skill and knowledge, instead of what items and upgrades you have. On the topic of items, one of the main mechanics of this game is trading. Oftentimes you will need to keep track of who wants what, and when you finally get an item you need to trade someone, it'll create a cascade of trade events. There's also a lot of thought put into what you want to put your mushrooms towards-- the game is very open, and so it's fun to always be making choices. These items also have uses-- for example, you can throw items, and ride around on them. Different items also have special properties in the world, like a springshroom bouncing you up when you stand on it, or different kinds of cars each driving you around with their own physics. This means there are always lots of different ways to get past an obstacle-- it feels less like a game where they programmed in a solution, and more like a playground or sandbox where there are lots of creative and fun ways to reach your goals. Overall, this is a really unique and creative game. It will constantly surprise you with new and cool ideas, and give you lots of freedom both of what you do, and how you do it. If you are tired and jaded of playing uninspired, overdesigned games, this is very very good. If you aren't, and you're just a casual player of normal games, this is still unabashedly very fun!