The story goes that in ye olde comic books, where everything was written in capital letters and kerning was a myth, they used to avoid the words “flick” and “flicker” because a capital L next to a capital I could easily smear together and be misread. It’s the same reason there’s only one major superhero named “Clint”, and it’s also the reason Clickolding stylizes its title in all-caps.
Clickolding is a clicker where you’re stuck in a grimy hotel room with a threatening masked man whose head kind of looks like a camel or a horse, or maybe like there’s something leaking or growing out of his face and it’s filling the mask in an unsettling way. The googly eyes do little to lessen the effect.
This man sits in his armchair and demands that you click. There’s a wad of cash in it for you if you click 10,000 times. He just wants to watch. And occasionally demand you stand in a different part of the room, or interact with something specific inside the room, and your clicker won’t increment until you do what he wants. He doesn’t move much, but occasionally his hands flex.
This format, the threatening man making you do strange things, is kind of like Inscryption if it didn’t turn into nostalgia-bait for Pokémon children partway through. The soundtrack is jazz trumpet, vinyl crackle, and rain, and the vibe is grimy. As you click, the man with a head like a Mafia threat periodically talks via text boxes, accompanied by a sound like a recording of Charlie Brown’s mom being played backward to find a Satanic message. Yes, it’s creepy.
The endless cycle of videogame discourse includes among its talking points “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding” and “videogames don’t have to be fun.” In the Venn diagram overlap of those two concepts is Clickolding, a game a patient and determined clicker could wrap up in forty minutes that exists to make you feel unsettled.
Do you want to know what it’s like to be made to perform a repetitive act someone else is enjoying way more than you while they occasionally give instructions? There’s a reason Clickolding’s Steam tags include “sexual content” despite its absence of nudity or sex, and it’s the same as the reason its name is stylized in all caps. Clickolding is a game about sex work, though one that veers into weird horror if you’re a good click piggy who clicks long enough and hard enough.
If you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go wash my mouse. Clickolding is available now on Steam and itch.io.