Created: June 26, 2015

The Clockwork Man: The Hidden World

This sequel to The Clockwork Man is a significant improvement. It has more and much better puzzles, and a bit of old-fashioned point-and-click adventuring.

The name, by the way, makes no sense, because there is no clockwork man: he was destroyed in the first episode.

I'll copy-and-paste some things from my review of the previous episode, because they are all relevant here:

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.

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 be 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).