Strange Scaffold is a developer known for games that delve into the weird and unsettling. Its most popular game is probably the third-person shooter fever dreamEl Paso, Elsewhere, which has since been picked up for a film adaptation starring Academy Award nominee LaKeith Stanfield. It’s also recently releasedLife Eaterand is working onI Am Your Beast, a frenetic, stylised FPS.
Somehow, Strange Scaffold has managed to squeezeanothergame into its release schedule, the deeply disturbing and mercifully shortClickolding, which you may nab on sale right now for the criminally low price of $2.69. From the name alone, you might be able to guess at what the game is gesturing at, but what you’re imagining is likely far less weird than the reality.
Clickolding is simple in what it asks of you. You are in a room with a man, who is wearing clothes stained with what looks suspiciously like either ketchup or blood, and is wearing a strange brown mask that looks kind of like a moose, sans antlers. The man says that he has the $14,000 you need for your surgery. All you have to do is click the clicker you hold in your left hand 10,000 times, and you’ll get your money.
As you might expect from the title’s closeness to the word cuckolding, there is an element of kink to this game. As you click, the man makes vaguely erotic comments from his chair in the corner. Before you hit a thousand, he forces you to stop, moaning that he wants you to wait. He tells you that his mouth is leaking, presumably with drool. He commands you to move around the small hotel room, facing away from him or looking right at him, standing in different areas or facing paintings on the walls.
This serves to force you to move around and do more than just click, but it’s also incredibly anxiety-inducing. When the man asked me to turn around, the clicking felt even worse than when I was looking at him, staring into his weirdly white, circular eyes with pinprick pupils. But when youarelooking at him, he is always looking at you, head tracking you around the room, hands occasionally flexing in front of him as if he wants to grab you. He exerts control over you, and you have no choice but to obey so you’re able to start clicking again.
My hands actually started to cramp from how hard I was clicking. I swapped between my mouse and my spacebar, which I tapped furiously with two fingers in an effort to speed up my clicks so I wouldn’t have to stand in this room, watching this man derive obvious pleasure from my innocent clicks.
As he made overt comments about my hands, told me about his family, and began tobrandish a gun, I tried to swallow my disgust and click through it. What else could I do but click through it? If I left, I wouldn’t get my money, and in a more practical sense, I wasn’t sure the game would save my clicks. It was the sunk cost fallacy at work. I’d already come so far, and this guy was freaking me out, but I wasn’t going to waste all my effort. I just had a little ways left to go, and this would be over.
I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that despite knowing that there’s a post-credits easter egg if you keep clicking, I jumped ship almost immediately. I couldn’t wait to not be clicking for this man, which is a testament to the strength of how creepy this simple, half an hour-long game ended up being. What is Clickolding trying to say? Is it about how the most innocent of actions can be sexualised without our participation, or how dreams possess us, or the potential of menial actions to lull us through discomfort? I don’t know, and I don’t care. All I know is that I’m done clicking, and I’m not going back.
