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Someone sits in the corner of a musky hotel room, beaming white eyes leering from behind a stretched mask, and he wants you to click a tally counter 10,000 times. Once the clicker reaches 10,000, it'll reset and you'll get the payout you were promised, or so the masked man says.
He'll sometimes ask you to stand up to tweak the thermostat, or click while staring at the wall, or click while in the bathroom - each time his long fingers tense and stretch like he's reaching some kind of, err, catharsis, let's say. There's nothing outwardly sexual about Clickolding, the new game from indie outfit Strange Scaffold, but the innuendo is as explicit as can be. He asks if you've ever done anything like this before. This is a game where you're doing whatever a stranger wants you to do for money that you'll never actually get.
You see, Clickolding is kind of the 'I want shorter games with worse graphics' meme come to life. Outersloth, the indie games fund from Among Us studio Inner Sloth, is already bearing fruit with Clickolding, a game that was in development for only two months and lasts all but 40 minutes, or as long as it takes you to click 10,000 times. This should be a crowd favorite at the next Games Done Quick event.
That means the entire game is done by the time you've satisfied the clearly distressed figure, and the game tells you this from the get-go. The promise of money is fruitless from the beginning, so what's the point of clicking? Maybe it's an allegory for the capitalist treadmill we're all running on, or a kind of meta commentary on games themselves since, you know, it's not a coincidence that the game's main verb is to literally click your mouse. Who's to say? There's all sorts of subtext you can read into here. Either way, Clickolding paints a wildly disturbing picture of what it feels like to be exploited in one way or another.
It might not sound like much of a 'fun' game, and to be fair, it's not. But Clickolding's 40-ish minute playtime will probably stick with me for longer than most 100-hour open-world romps, so please, developers, make more games like this. I might just be able to comb through my backlog at this rate. And, hey, you can turn the simple act of clicking into an action that opens up all sorts of questions. Win-win scenario.
Clickolding is available on Steam for $2.70/£2.50, and it's already made its way to number one on the platform's 'New and Trending' chart.
Take a look at our upcoming indie games feature for a dive into similarly zany adventures.
