Clock Simulator is ostensibly a rhythm game where every puzzle is timed to the ticking of a second, but in reality it’s more of an obtuse, interactive screen-saver collection with barely any personality.
The tutorial gives you the timing, showing you how this game measures the passage of a second, which may be different than how you as the player counts a single second. This should be a non-issue if the puzzles afterward do a good job of reminding you of the timing through something like an onscreen metronome. After that first level, however, there is no way to visually keep track of the timing, aside from red subtraction lines that appear on the clock hands (if there are any in the level) to tell you how much you missed the perfect by and remove that much from the hand, making it smaller. The issue with this method, however, is that the speed of the invisible marker slows as the hands shrink, meaning that anyone playing would have a hard time keeping track of it. This gave me the feeling that I should tape a wall clock to my television, because at least then there would be some way for me to keep track of the timing.
This game is visually bland with a minimalist design, if I’m attributing said blandness to intention. The most interesting the visual design ever becomes is a generic moving background with turning clock cogs and a box-shaped pig that appears multiple times in the game for no discernible reason. While it may sound obvious, pigs have nothing to do with clocks and there is nothing in the game design that implies a pig would be more fitting than anything else. It feels as though pigs were used as the mascot character of the game for the sake of randomness.
It doesn’t escape me that this game could be made in the style of something like Goat Simulator, which is intentionally made to feel unfinished for humor, but I doubt that’s the case here. This game plays fine and there’s no real glitches that I’ve seen, likely due to the gameplay being too basic for many glitches to appear. Rather, it seems like a game that was either made quickly or for people so vastly different from myself that I couldn’t possibly understand its appeal.
The best way I can sum up my feelings about this game is that even though I didn’t pay for it, I felt like I had been ripped off after 10 minutes of playing. If it isn’t obvious, I’d recommend that no one buy this game so that it may disappear into the void from whence it came and be forgotten by the world.
I hope you have not played Clock Simulator, but if you have, please submit your lamentations in the comments and join me in my disgust. And if I’ve missed something, please let me know so I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time.