Innersloth, the small time developers behind the sudden video game culture-shaker Among Us, wanted to give back to fellow indie devs with unique ideas and no money to execute them. Their method of doing so is via the announcement of Outersloth, a game development fund specifically for weird indies to pitch their weird ideas and get a bit of extra cash to execute it. It’s a sweet gesture, one that any indie dev would find it hard to say no to—and especially not Strange Scaffold, the developers behind Outersloth’s first publishing outing, CLICKOLDING.
What no one (except Outersloth and Strange Scaffold themselves) could’ve expected is that Outersloth’s first outing would manage the somewhat impossible task of creating one of the years most instantly talked about video games. And not only that, would do it via a set of mechanisms and subject matter that run seemingly antithetical to everything that the much meme’d Among Us found success in.
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The Clickold Only Wants One Thing
In CLICKOLDING, you are a nameless male with a clicker. A masked man dubbed “The Clickold” has offered you $14,000 for a surgery you need, all you have to do in return is… well, as the game’s steam page says,
The man in the corner of your hotel room wants you to click something. He wants to watch you click it.
It may not come as a surprise that the way you interact with the game is the same as the protagonist: you click. and click. and click. You click when you are told, you stop when you are told. You are playing the game, technically, but the game is also playing with you. The sex work analogy is not subtext—it, and your reaction to it, is the very heart of the experience.
The player receives simple instructions from the Clickold.
There is a bit more to the game beyond that, both in terms of narrative elements and things to do. You are given access to WASD controls that function similarly to grid-walking in old dungeon crawlers, which allows you to walk about the room (while clicking, of course) and interact with the environment.
To tell you note for note what happens afterwards throughout the rest of the game is unfair to the game itself, though, and its intentions. CLICKOLDING is three dollars and around 40 minutes of game-play if you speed thorough it, but it is an intimate—and I mean intimate in every way you can think of the word’s meaning—experience that goes beyond its price tag or game play time.
A Short Run And A Lot To Think About
No other game that I’ve played this year has instantly challenged me and my concept of gaming more strongly than CLICKOLDING, and, given the adult nature of many of the games we review here at The Gay Goods, that’s saying something. What’s more impressive is that just about every possible reaction to this game exists. A scroll through the steam page’s review section, if one wants to risk spoiling the game for itself, reveals that players have walked away from this game thinking it was everything from horror, to comedy, to erotic, and back again.
What it is most consistently, though, and what makes it an incredible triumph of the medium, is that it is something different to everyone. And for that, we think the subversive and mesmerizing CLICKOLDING is a must play for every single gamer this year, queer or otherwise. (It’s just a nice coincidence for our site that it happens to have two dudes clickin’ together in it.)
PROS
- One of gaming’s most intense and meta experiences this year, if not this decade
- A fantastic, unnerving atmosphere held up by RJ Lake’s sparse experimental jazz OST
- A low price for an experience that will sit with you far beyond any other game you might play this year
- Somehow, Outersloth managed to get a lot of YouTubers to play gay sex work game without anyone realizing it
- Someone on this planet is getting a new kink from this game, guaranteed
- Just enough puzzles and interactive to keep even the most novel-averse gamer invested
- A shocking ending and post-game sequence that must be seen
CONS
- Clickold is here for a good time, not a long time (which is, perhaps, unfortunate, given the potential presented)
