Review: Clickolding

Oxford Dictionary defines a cuckold as “a man whose wife has sex with another man.” In modern parlance, it has been appropriated to describe an erotic fetish involving deriving pleasure from watching one’s partner in a carnal act with another. It’s often…

Oh, the game’s name is Clickolding? Well, this is embarrassing.

Clickolding (PC)
Developer: Strange Scaffold
Publisher: Strange Scaffold, Outersloth
Released: July 16, 2024
MSRP: $2.99

Clickolding comes to us from Xalavier Nelson Jr.’s label, Strange Scaffold. Recently, it gave us El Paso, Elsewhere, one of my favorite games of 2023, and Life Eater, which is also a game. The developer is all about experimenting, and Clickolding is certainly an experiment.

You find yourself in a motel room, with a man in a mask staring you down and a tally counter in your hand. The man instructs you to click it. Then click it again. Then click it 9,998 more times. At that point, the tally will roll over back to zero.

He just wants to watch. He wants to see you in the perverse act of pressing a button repeatedly. Just you and his tally counter in an incremental embrace as he watches from his chair in the corner of the room. Roll that counter over, get paid, and then avoid eye contact whenever you bump into each other in public.

Here at Destructoid, we don’t kink shame.

While your depraved button pressing is the center of the action, you’re also able to move around the room to… fidget, I guess. There are interactive objects scattered about, but largely, you’ll only poke at them when your client/aggressor tells you to. At the most complicated, you have to find a key, but by the time that happens, you might have already found the key through the course of your pacing.

As the tally racks up, the masked pervert will talk to you. The idea is that the narrative advances as you climb to 10,000, but it really doesn’t go anywhere.

Clickolding positions itself in a way that suggests it’s about difficult subject matter such as prostitution and shame. It kind of is, but it’s wearing mittens. Not that it needs to be overt, but it should at least be insightful. It’s not. There are sometimes euphemisms and other times it’s more cryptic, but it never gets a punch in. It doesn’t delve very far into the person who is watching you. If it tries to make the player feel shame for their actions, it’s not effective. If it wants to frame the kink that it is representing in an empathetic or judgmental way, it completely fails to do so.

The narrative was where Clockolding needed to hit hardest, and it’s more of a soft stroke.

There are things that Clickolding does well. For example, the clicking works. If you click fast, the number goes up quicker, and if you click slow, it doesn’t. It’s a really good way to shorten the lifespan of your mouse and carpal tunnels.

Beyond that, the atmosphere is well executed. The motel room is small, cramped, and just crappy enough to be believable. You move in increments, like an old dungeon crawler, so you aren’t able to inspect things closer, giving everything a sort of claustrophobic feel. There aren’t many places you can hide from the gaze of the masked man, but you are allowed to leave if you want to lose all your progress for absolutely no reward.

I don’t want to spoil things, but there is an epilogue if you click well.

There isn’t really much else to say. Clickolding is Clickolding. It’s $3, and it gives you a reason to click 10,000 times. There are games out there that cost much more and don’t provide nearly as much clicking.

Clickolding really needed to nail its narrative to be a successful experiment, and it really doesn’t. It’s much too unfocused and far too superficial, never really drilling far into its subject matter. There were a lot of directions that could have been taken, and none of them were. That doesn’t mean that Clickolding doesn’t have value, but it’s not something that needs to be experienced. You could get the same pleasure from just watching.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}