The Clockwork Man

Eh. I am giving this hidden-object game a thumbs up, but only barely. It's not terrible, just not great.

It's straightforward hidden-object scenes with a handful of puzzles: no point-and-click adventuring. Some hidden-object scenes are innovative, in that they involve zooming (dumb) or scrolling (cool). Otherwise, they are of moderate difficulty, and sometimes not quite fair.

Another innovation is in the hint system, which involves constantly upgrading your robot helper. But ... the whole point of playing such games is to avoid the hints and enjoy the hidden-object scenes! I never used the robot, so this innovation was lost on me.

The story is the usual humdrum, with good voice acting, but there are too many cutscenes. There is too much effort to put the hidden-object scenes into the context of the story, with some quite silly results. You're supposed to play a budding engineer, but all she does is search through piles of junk for junk. :) As others have commented: being the only female cleaning up after all the male characters is quite insulting, but then this genre isn't exactly known for its progressive values.

If you're a fan of hidden-object games, you might enjoy this game for the scrolling scenes. Also the sequel, The Clockwork Man: The Hidden World, is much better, and it does continue this story, so if you want to play that one you might want to play this one. In itself, it is a forgettable and buggy game.

I'd like to thank the developer for supporting Linux, but unfortunately the Linux port isn't good. I could not activate fullscreen mode (though at least I could maximize the window) and could never quite get the sound levels right. (The default sound level has the music as loud as the voice acting, which makes it impossible to hear what people are saying.) The game seems to have been developed in Flash—which I don't mind, as long as the final result works. As it stands, it's all a bit sluggish and buggy (I have a very powerful PC, so hardware is not the issue).