Deep down, I think we all want to be the most patient, empathetic, and understanding person we can be. To be understood, we must seek to understand ourselves. I am misunderstood because I’m not perfect, even when I expect the world to be. It can be hard to understand, but in a way, this world is less homogenized than ever before. A niche within a niche, even when you don’t know what the niche is. These days, there’s something for everyone. Isn’t that nice?
I’m not perfect, but I could at least try to live and let live, right? My appetite isn’t met by yucking someone’s yum. I get no closer to satisfaction by kink-shaming. Tastes change, and one day, you might have a dream. Maybe that dream comes to you on your own. Perhaps that dream is given to you by someone else. I didn’t know a person’s dream could involve watching someone else click a tally counter. That is until I played Clickolding.
In Clickolding, a distressing masked man in a hotel room offers you money to watch you click a tally counter 10,000 times. You can click with the mouse button. You can click by holding the mouse button or the space bar. It doesn’t matter how you click. But you can’t stop clicking.
Clickolding is brought to you by Strange Scaffold, the team behind I Am Your Beast, An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, and one of my favourite games of 2023, El Paso, Elsewhere. Strange Scaffold have a pedigree for never repeating themselves with their games, and Clickolding is no exception.
You could describe Clickolding as an adventure game. You could tell it as a horror game. I guess it depends on how understanding you are of the needs, wants, and dreams of others. Clickolding is short, you can finish the game in 40-ish minutes, but more than makes up for it offering a terrifically strange experience at a reasonable price point. I think of Clickolding as a mind-bending horror experience where you walk around a claustrophobic environment in first-person while meeting the whims of a person who wants to watch you click a tally counter.
The story is told as you progress through your clicks, learning more about the distressing man as the tally counter clicks up. From the first click to the last(?) Clickolding delivers a brilliant and bizarre experience that can only exist through gaming.
To describe what makes Clickolding great, I would quickly veer into spoiler territory, but even when considering the repetitive gameplay nature, I thoroughly enjoyed clicking the tally counter, even when unsure if I needed to do so. The light-distorted jazz throughout the game grew on me as I clicked closer and closer to 10,000. When I reached 10,000 clicks, I was surprised at how much of a roller coaster a simple game like Clickolding had taken me on. But I didn’t stop clicking. I kept clicking long after 10,000.
