Clickolding, a video game where you cuckold a strange individual with a count clicker, is a genuinely upsetting experience. The entire game is designed to make you uncomfortable, even down to the setup.
You – an equally strange individual – have accepted the offer of $14,000. The money is under the bed; you can get it after the “session”. There’s no other context, and it’s never truly elaborated on. In fact, Clickolding’s best elements are entirely down to how limited the game is.
Horror, for the most part, is at its best when it’s snappy. Rarely does the genre manage to keep the mystique before it sinks into exposition territory.
Clickolding, which I finished in about 45 minutes, is one of the more terrifying games simply because it never explains itself. It uses the allotted time to pressure the player with demands and a constant reminder of what you’re doing.
You play from the first-person perspective, something that after the last three decades of FPS games, has mostly become known for freedom of movement.
There’s no freedom to wander the room. You move in a rigid, Myst-like fashion around a very limited space. You can’t even look around freely. The only reprieve from staring at the individual in the chair is to turn away or hide in the bathroom. However, he’s always present and demanding. Making you move to the next “perfect” location.
The limited interactivity you have with the world eggs on that nothing is right. Nothing more is than through the method of play, where Clickolding limits the player deliberately.
In a medium filled with power plays, to be made the submissive and obedient sexualised object can drive you nuts. How fast can I get this done? Man, my fingers are tired. We’re only at 4000? This guy said we’d have to let it tick over to 10,000. There’s something at the end of this.
Limited movement and the only real control in the room is to click and listen to the masked man who has now pulled out a gun. As the game ratchets things up, and your subject begins to ramble on about a mysterious force, it truly captures that feeling of helplessness of being stuck with a weirdo. Like getting on the tram, only to see someone ranting to themselves and directing it at you.
There’s nothing you can do, except click. Keep clicking. Keep going. You can’t come back later, there’s zero save function and if you try and take one of the few non-click-based actions like leaving the room, the game ends.
Isn’t it horrifying, that despite accepting the circumstances and tired fingers, your effort won’t be rewarded? Keep going.
Every time you turn, his piercing eyes and mumbled Animal Crossing-styled speech treads ever closer to nightmarish. Every element of video games are there, but it’s skewed.
Twisted and turned on its head. The classic push-pull of “risk and reward” just isn’t present.
Move on command, click, click, click. I even found ways to make the clicking easier, pressing a cup on the space bar to alleviate the stress. It’s the opposite of modern video games, even independent ones that try to subvert expectations. Artsy games that still give you the satisfaction of completion, knowing that you did something to affect the world you’ve inhabited.
Here, you’re powerless, the servant to a cuckold who has no interest in you. Desperately alone, but after some time – however short – I found myself comfortable in his presence. We both knew the deal.
Even in the crescendo, where the individual turns the gun on himself, rambling about finishing what you started. Just as I’d begun to accept the warped world, it was stripped away from me. I’ve been cucked.
Clickolding doesn’t elaborate, because it doesn’t need to. Its 45 minutes of being in my life has stewed longer in my brain than the last four years of video games.
Games don’t have to be massive to strike an impact. An abundance of features and systems are outshined by the simplicity of clicking. By themes, ambience, looks and the confidence to do something like this.
After the credits roll, a secret opens up and no, none of it was worth it. A miraculous void, inhabited by a lone individual, all in white. They deliberately tell me that there’s nothing left and they won’t interfere with my clicking.
The game ends, as the screen goes black and my face stares back. I think I’m ashamed? Do I even commit to writing this piece?
There was never anything in this for me, the player, except that I got to experience Clickolding. Now I spread the word of Clickolding, spreading it like a virus, like a cough.
At least I can tick one fetish off my list that I’m definitely not into.