Clock of Atonement

Caution: Spoilers may be ahead.

Can I preface this view by saying that you should actually play this game before you read this review. It takes ~15 minutes and the return for it is really worth your time. This review is intended as an analysis of the game rather than a point of recommendation or anything, since it's so short and the filesize is so small that you might as well download and play it right now. There's nothing stopping you! Come back here when you've finished.



In Clock of Atonement, you play a guy that stalks a girl. You have to try and manipulate time to prevent a series of events from happening that ends in you killing your girl. You control the objects and you get to pick what you move around and stuff, much like the game Ghost Trick. It has a simple colorful art style with cute little speech bubbles and a constant sense of mystery and unease. A mysterious cloaked salesman gives you a "Clock of Atonement" over the counter and says just to take it. You do, and then that's where things start to get interesting.

You are a ghost that has to save your girlfriend from being killed by... yourself. "OK... this time it'll be different," you say. You can interact with things that are highlighted, and examine objects like knives placed around the screen. As a ghost in time, you can manipulate objects to alter the effects of time. Objects that can be manipulated at any one time are highlighted, which stops you from fumbling around interacting with every single object. That's a nice design decision. For example, flipping over a chair will cause the girl to trip over it and then the assaulter (you) will start kissing her over and over again. The kissing leads to unexpected results, to say the least. When the murder happens, the clock stops, and you have to rewind time again.



Some of the murders are particularly disturbing. This is nice. I wonder sometimes why the ghost was entirely repentant of the actions he had just done, but it gave it a nice kind of dark edge to the tale, because you're not really sure if the ghost wants her alive because he wants to terrorize her all over again, or whether he's truly repentant of his decisions. My mind kept going, "Do I actually want to save this girl, or should this dude suffer the consequences of his actions?"

One of the majorly cool things about this game is the rewind special effect. Seeing the effects of your actions rewind quickly must have been a hard effect to make, and it pays off in dividends, giving the game a really polished feel. Over the course of the game you get to see how deranged the killer is and this makes feelings inside you that are a mixture of hatred and shock. It's feelings that you don't really get from games, which in my opinion verifies this game's artfulness. I want a game to make me feel, and I'm sure a lot of others do too.





Nevertheless, this ending showed that even the time-travelling character did not understand the situation properly of him invading her home. He says, "Do you not love me? Do you hate me?" even though she was acting in pure self-defense. This kind of character is fascinating to me because I want to know how they think that way. Perhaps it is perverted that I am interested in how the deluded psyche works, but I do believe that it people can get sick of dissecting normal people, and sometimes insane people have more interesting minds to dissect. Not that I condone insane killings in any way, shape or form, in fact I oppose them greatly, but I still find their minds to how they got there very interesting sometimes as a negative example.

It's a really interesting philosophical judgment that comes from this. Not exactly about time, but about the human psyche. Every single outcome was wrong. At the very least, it was interesting, with a nice concept, and its ending was fairly abrupt, but it felt like some things weren't wrapped up very well. I wasn't sure if he truly atoned, and what happened to him afterwards. Also, what did the atonement achieve? Did the time erase the events of him killing her? It looked like everything was still stuck in time, but I wasn't sure. It was confusing, yet somewhat satisfying at the same time, but I still think the ending could have been more satisfying.



Overall Judgement
Presentation: 9/10 -- The idea is presented in a really slick way, and everything is intuitive.
Graphics: 9/10 -- Colourful, simple graphics.
Sound: 9/10 -- Minimal sound used suspensefully.
Gameplay: 9/10 -- Really innovative gameplay. Could have been longer.
Lasting Appeal: 8.5/10 -- Extremely unique in execution. But due to the confusing short ending I deducted half a point. It was still very good though.

Overall: 8.9/10 -- I was extremely pleased by this game. It was great, bordering on amazing. The game left me with something outstanding to remember it by - a novel gameplay mechanic with clever writing and beautifully minimal sound and graphics. The game was minimal in concept, and yet still effective. I recommend that you play this right now because it doesn't take long and it represents an inspired new idea.

Loser out.