Clickolding's Click Daddy made me his Click Piggy, oink oink
That'll do, pig.
![A masked man stares intently.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/dWiEyBW6p9B7zQxM8MSWPb-320-80.jpg)
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 new clicker game 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.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.