This summer, you can see more “Adventures” of Ben and Dan, on both consoles and PC. But this time, Ben and Dan Adventures will come in an entirely new game named Lair of the Clockwork God.
If you are unfamiliar with the name, Ben and Dan Adventures is a game series developed by Size Five Games, a studio founded by Dan Marshall and Ben Ward. This is also the developer of The Swindle, a stealthy actiony, side-on, against-the-clock game in 2015, which is mainly about stealing money out of safes.
But precede The Swindle was Time Gentleman, Please!; and even before that was Ben There, Dan That!. All of the titles we mentioned here are adventures with Dan and Ben being the friendly characters who squabble with each other throughout the entire games. And now, they are returning in the Lair of the Clockwork God.
This latest adventure game is, in fact, a point & click game. Since Ben and Dan have different tastes in term of what games they like, the twist now lies with them.
Ben is fond of adventure games, the ones that are similar to the products of LucasArts. It is clearly reflected through his ways of interacting with the surrounding world, which is using objects as well as combining them in order to solve different puzzles. On the contrary, Dan is a huge fan of platform games, we can easily see that through his interactions, too. He tends to run, jump and push blocks around. However, it’s essential for both of them to find a way and combine their own genre-powers so as to overcome the obstacles that lie ahead.
"We all have fond memories of point-and-click games, but honestly who has the time for all that endless meandering anymore?" commented Dan Marshall.
"Lair of the Clockwork God has been designed to retain the best of the genre: meaty puzzles, huge inventories, funny jokes, and plenty of verbs! But is structured more like a platform game, so it's forward-focused, driven, and fast-paced, with accessible, localised puzzles, all broken up with platforming challenges," he added.
This concept will be more easy to understand if you watch the debut trailer of Clockwork God right below.
Incidentally, considering the console platforms of the game, Size Five Games is definitely taking Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch into consideration. The game developer just simply doesn't want to confirm them officially just in case anything ends up being canceled.
"I don't want to spoil anything, because this is all stuff I want the player to experience first-hand, but the full game itself sort of plays with a lot of conventions of what a video game is 'allowed' to do," said Marshall. "I foresee some problems with certification on consoles which might require some hefty rewriting of some of the content. I just don't want to say 'yeah it's coming to Switch!' without a conversation with Nintendo first."
Should you enjoy how Lair of the Clockwork God looks, Ben There, Dan That! as well as Time Gentleman, Please! will get a discount of 90 percent on Steam next week.