The Oxford Dictionary defines cuckold as “a man whose wife has sex with another man.” In newfangled parlance, the term has been appropriated to describe an erotic fetish involving the enjoyment of watching one’s partner engage in sexual intercourse with another man. This is often…
Oh, the name of the game is Clicking? Well, this is embarrassing.
Click (Computer)
Developer: Strange Scaffold
Publisher: Strange Scaffold, Outersloth
Released: July 16, 2024
Suggested retail price: $2.99
Click comes from Xalavier Nelson Jr.’s label, Strange Scaffold. She recently gave us El Paso, Elsewhereone of my favorite games of 2023 and Life Eater, which is also a game. The creator is all about experimenting, and Click is certainly an experiment.
You find yourself in a motel room with a man in a mask looking at you and holding a counter in his hand. The man tells you to click it. Then click it again. Then click it 9,998 more times. At that point the counter will return to zero.
He just wants to watch. He wants to see you press the button perversely. Just you and his meter in a gradual embrace while he watches from a chair in the corner of the room. Roll the meter, pay, then avoid eye contact when you bump into each other in public.
At Destructoid we do not apply shame to fetishism.
While your broken button mashing is the center of the action, you can also move around the room to… fidget, I guess. There are interactive objects scattered about, but you’ll generally only poke at them when your client/aggressor tells you to. In the most complicated cases, you have to find a key, but by that point you can already find the key in the middle of your pace.
As the number increases, the masked pervert will talk to you. The idea is that the narrative progresses as you reach 10,000, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.
Click it positions itself in a way that suggests it’s dealing with hard topics like prostitution and shame. It kind of is, but it wears the gloves. Not that it has to be overt, but it should at least be insightful. It’s not. Sometimes it’s euphemistic, and other times it’s more cryptic, but it never pulls a punch. It doesn’t delve too deeply into the person watching you. If it’s trying to make the player feel ashamed of their actions, it’s not effective. If it’s trying to frame the fetish it represents in an empathetic or judgmental way, it fails miserably.
The story was like this, where Watchmaking you have to hit the hardest, and the impact is rather gentle.
There are things that Click works well. For example, clicking works. If you click rapid, the number increases faster, and if you click slowly, it doesn’t. This is a really good way to shorten the life of your mouse and carpal tunnel syndrome.
The atmosphere is also well-executed. The motel room is petite, compact, and just bad enough to be believable. You move incrementally, like an ancient dungeon crawler, so you can’t get a closer look, which makes everything feel claustrophobic. There aren’t many places to hide from the masked man’s gaze, but you can leave if you want to lose all your progress for absolutely no reward.
I don’t want to spoil the fun, but if you click challenging enough, you’ll find an epilogue.
There is really nothing more to say. Click Is ClickIt costs $3 and gives you a reason to click 10,000 times. There are games that cost a lot more and don’t give you as many clicks.
Click really had to nail its narrative to be a successful experiment, and it doesn’t really do that. It’s too unfocused and too superficial, never really getting into the nitty-gritty. There were a lot of directions it could have gone, but none of them were taken. That’s not to say Click it has no value, but it is not something that needs to be experienced. You can get the same pleasure by just watching.
