Xalavier Nelson Jr. and his studio Strange Scaffold were one of the major discoveries of last year for me, and in 2024 they continue to surprise. They already released another game earlier this year: Life Eater, a horror fantasy kidnapping simulator, and it’s about as unique as it sounds. And unique is certainly a word I would also use to describe their newest game, Clickolding, developed by Strange Scaffold and published by Outerlsoth, a game in which you meet a stranger in a hotel room who wants to watch you click, and so you click as many times as he wants you to. And a little heads up: even though this is already their second game released this year, it’s not the last one for 2024.
Explaining Clickolding is incredibly easy; the aforementioned description is already like 90% of it, but truly conveying the experience of playing it is a whole different beast. You find yourself in a hotel room with a clicker in your hand and a strange man with a strange mask sitting in the corner. He tells you to click. 10.000 times, to be exact, and then you get the money. You made some kind of deal with each other, seemingly met online, because you desperately need that money for an operation of some sort. And so you start clicking, and he starts talking.
It’s an entirely one-sided conversation. He occasionally gives you orders on how and where to click, but for the most part, it feels more like an aimless stream of consciousness of a person who’s needed someone to just listen for a while, maybe their whole life. He jumps all over the place, picking up threads of thought before dropping them again two sentences later, speaking of grand ideas with no perspective and making statements with no points to them. It’s the ramblings of a man who doesn’t know what to say but needs to talk. And as you would expect from Strange Scaffold, it is exceptionally well written. It feels incredibly personal, despite there being not a whole lot of depth to any of his individual statements. There’s an incredible specificity to the whole rant, despite lacking many details. Behind the Clickold hides a real personality, despite the mask and the digitized voice.
Every game I’ve played from Strange Scaffold prior to Clickolding has had fantastic voice acting, often from the man Xalavier Nelson Jr. himself, but here the voice of the Clickold is nothing more than low digital murmuring. Sound in Clickold is much of what creates the sinister undertone that you’ll find from the first click to the last. There’s the rain from outside your window, the static white noise of the TV, and, of course, the clicking of your clicker. Clickolding is a game that thrives on its minimalism, and those three sounds coupled with the low grumbling voice are all it needs to unsettle.
But even if all the dialogue were spoken aloud in traditional voice acting, it would hardly clear up the words. Clickolding is a tough nut to crack because it is impossible to shake the feeling that there’s something here that’s being communicated so clearly, and at the same time, I’m not sure where to even begin with what that might be. But it’s a game that latches onto you and refuses to leave, forcing you to click and click and click. Clickolding is a game about clicking, but really it’s a game about listening.
Nairon played Clickolding on PC with a review code.
