Some Thoughts on Clickolding (2024)

Why do we click?

The setup for Clickolding (released by Strange Scaffold on July 16, 2024) is fairly straightforward. You hold a tally counter in a strange motel room while a man watches. He wants you to click. He’s willing to pay you $14,000 to click the counter enough times to reset - 10,000 in total.

He wants you to click. He needs you to click.

Seems simple enough. Clickolding is a bite-sized narrative experience (which costs only 3.89 CAD on steam at the time of writing) from the same studio that brought us the critically-acclaimed throwback Max Payne-eque El Paso Elsewhere in 2023 as well as the upcoming I Am Your Beast. However, Clickolding is a very different beast from either of those games. The extent of the action is, as you may have guessed, clicking for the clickold. As per usual with most narrative games, this is certainly better experienced for yourself if you have any desire of playing it, and to get the most out of this critique. If you’ve already played it, read on. Even if you don’t intend to but think this is cool, please consider supporting the people who made it. Also, the game has a content warning for sexual content and depictions of suicide, and I will be discussing the latter briefly below, so please skip if you are sensitive to such topics.

Onto some analysis. The immediate jest of Clickolding is obvious - click to make the number go up. Why? Virtual currency. Fake goods. Of course, the real reason we click is to see the narrative unfold, to try to understand more of why we are in this room, who is this guy, what does he want, why does he want us to click, etc etc. As we hit more milestones, the clickold tells us more about his life while also making requests of us to increase his comfort, such as adjusting the thermostat or turning the tv set on or off. It’s never implied or depicted that the clickold’s desire is purely physical or sexual in nature - it seems like the clicking, and the need to see the number go up and the tally reset, speaks to a deeper, more complex need. Of course the exact nature of the clickold is never made explicit, and there is quite a bit of room for interpretation. Sometimes he asks you to click slower - sometimes faster. Sometimes he wants you to hold on a number for a bit, before you can continue.

As we click, we learn that the clickold has a family consisting of a wife, a son, and a daughter. He wonders what they would think if they knew he was here. And why is he here? He says it’s because of a dream he had of a white room and a man in a chair. He laments that he used to click, but that he is no longer able to. Throughout, he makes a couple very strong statements about being STRONG and CLEAN, while he seems quite the opposite - he seemingly has blood on his shirt, remarks that there’s something leaking from his mouth but that he can’t reach it through the mask, and seems ashamed to be here. At one point he also starts waving a gun around, and we get the sense that the clickold is definitely concerned with POWER. The relationship between the title and the act of cuckoldry needs no explanation, and therein lies the key to understanding the relationship to power, and more specifically power dynamics. We’re informed early on that the reason we are clicking is for money, and that our character needs this money for an operation. Though the nature of this operation isn’t discussed, we can assume it is vital, otherwise our character (hopefully) would have better things to do. This immediately puts the clickold in an immense position of power. The proposition quickly becomes click or die.

And you do click in this game, make no mistake. There are long stretches composed entirely of the steady cadence (or not, depending how long you’ve been going) of the tally counter clicking away. It’s quite meditative actually, and I found these moments to be quite relaxing. As innocuous as Clickolding may seem, the atmosphere and the way the narrative unfolds bit by bit ratchets up the tension in a delightful way. There are moments where the Clickold asks you to stand in a dark bathroom and click, and I found myself noticeably more nervous anytime the Clickold wasn’t in view. This is because the simple premise of the game begs for subversion. Savvy players instantly will know that something is up, and that keeps us clicking even more. We can’t wait to get to 10,000 and see what happens, what’s going to change, how the script is going to be flipped.

And perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised as to what happens when we get there. Having become increasingly manic and distraught over the course of the clicking, the clickold finally seems to have reached his peak and swiftly offs himself with the gun mentioned earlier. Dark. Again we see a manifestation of the clickold’s desire for control - he wanted to choose his exit. Again we see a contradiction to the clickold’s self-characterization. He was not strong enough to confront his demons, confront the dream and the man and the tally counter and accept them, and instead fell victim to them. His conscience, as we see throughout the clicking, is not clean as he seems plagued by guilt over both the assumed disapproval of his family and his no longer being able to click himself, resorting to paying a stranger to click for him in a motel room.

At a couple points during the clicking, the clickold asks the player to focus on a couple of paintings in the room as they click. The first depicts a blind man being healed by angels and is more significant - the second, a tiger at rest. As for the tiger, the clickold remarks upon the tiger’s nature, wondering if it realizes the ramifications its ferocity and the damage it is capable of. The answer is certainly not, but the parallel to the clickold is significant here. As for the blind man, the clickold remarks that there is something off about that painting, and it is revealed to be a portal to the clickold’s dream world if the player continues clicking in the post-credits scene. Again the painting is littered with thematic significance and actually ties into the painting of the tiger as well. The clickold seems blind to his situation, blind to his family, and maybe unaware of the damage being done by his clicking obsession, his chasing the dream, which may prove to be his ultimate undoing.

As for the man in the white room in the dream, he looks past the character and addresses the player directly, remarking on the total number of clicks prominently displayed in large font floating in the void above his head, serving to reinforce the greater clicker critique. He bears a striking resemblance to the clickold, though with a fancier suit and a more monochromatic appearance, suggesting the clickold perhaps even modeled his appearance, at least to his best approximation, after the man in the dream. The man also remarks that the people he contact don’t usually remember him, that the clickold was an exception. Of course, this lends another interpretation to the angel painting - perhaps the clickold was one with a type of rare sight, gifted to him by higher beings. Or it could have been reinforcing that the real truth we seek to glimpse is hidden in the painting, through the portal.

So where does this leave us with our theme of power? Well, the makers of the game certainly have power over the players - they got us to stand in a room and click 10,000 times for a strange man in a mask, AND we payed them $4 CAD to do it! Through the lure of mystery, intrigue, suspense, narrative breadcrumbs, piecing something together, maybe even just a novel experience… Whichever carrot is on the stick, they got us hook, line, and sinker. It speaks to the power of incentives in games, be it narrative story elements or numbers that go up. In some ways it brings us right back to our original question: Why do we click? But this isn’t an indictment of Clickolding, and the devs clearly weren’t trying to get one over on anyone, hence the short run-time and upfront disclaimer as to its length. Clickolding is asking the question to provoke thought and maybe cause us to examine how we engage with media of all kinds as the landscape becomes increasingly complex, saturated, and chaotic.

Of course, there’s a lot in Clickolding that is deliberately left up for the player to piece together or decide for themselves, and this is certainly one of its strengths. Clickolding resists putting too fine a point on its narrative, leading the player to ask interesting questions and making for one of the most memorable gaming experiences I’ve had this year. It’s not one that I’m going to stop thinking about any time soon, that’s for sure. It asks uncomfortable questions and delivers something truly unique.