A giant Clock Tower plunges the world of Tearfeld into eternal night. A kid with a clock-hand sword and a mechanical cuckoo bird has to fix it. Yes, this is a ClockPunk video game, and yes, The Doctor approves of its entire premise. Duskfade, from Spanish indie studio Weird Beluga and published by Fireshine Games, hit PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on August 13th at $29.99. The aesthetic is the real payload here: rusted machinery, ticking motifs, grandfather-clock grappling hooks, and surreal architecture that feels like a fever dream someone had inside a pocketwatch. It already swept three awards at BCN Game Fest (including Best Game and Best Sound), so the bones are undeniably there.

Now, the honest part: the pro reviews are… more complicated. Steam players are sitting at 89% Very Positive, which is respectable. The critics, on the other hand, keep landing on the same note: gorgeous world, competent-to-repetitive combat, levels that don’t fully live up to the art. That tracks. Sometimes a team nails the vibe and the mechanics are just a vehicle to get you through more of it. For ClockPunk fans, Duskfade is essentially a guided tour of a world you want to live in, even if the tour guide occasionally runs you in circles. I’m giving it ΩΩΩ: the aesthetic earns its keep, the execution needs another pass, and I’d still rather be here than in a hundred brown-corridor shooters. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockwork cuckoo bird companion comes close.

The Doctor does not play puzzle-adventure games because they are “relaxing.” The Doctor plays them because there is something deeply satisfying about a clockpunk automaton named Oscar following you across half of Europe on a train powered by sheer mechanical stubbornness. Syberia, Benoît Sokal’s masterwork of wind-up melancholy, has been given the full remaster treatment, and the updated version is sitting right there on Steam judging you for every FPS-bro game you bought instead.

If you somehow missed the original: you play as Kate Walker, a Manhattan lawyer who arrives in a tiny Alpine village to finalize a factory acquisition, only to discover the inventor she’s looking for has wandered off on a quixotic mission involving woolly mammoths and a place called Syberia. The world Sokal built is ClockPunk in its bones: brass automatons, hand-wound mechanisms, a whole civilization built on springs and ingenuity instead of steam or diesel. It is gorgeous and a little heartbreaking and it has absolutely zero exploding helicopters, which is the correct amount. Oscar, the automaton companion, remains one of the better written non-human characters in gaming, and I will not be taking questions on this point.

The Omega7Red Formulae declares this one ΩΩΩΩ½. If you have never played it, the remaster is the version to start with. If you have played it, you already know. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a good clockwork train comes close.

Via: Steam