a A man in a strange, animalistic mask sits slumped in an armchair in a dingy motel room and watches you click a hand-held tally counter. He offers you $14,000 if you keep clicking until the number resets to 10,000, so you do. Occasionally he makes polite but suggestive requests: go faster, go slower, stop and try again, but he remains motionless, except for the occasional flexion of his hand.

Clicking the left mouse button, you wander around the room, admiring the paintings on the walls, the out-of-sync TV, the thermostat, etc. But as you approach the final scene, the man slowly begins to reveal bits and pieces of his life, and the atmosphere of an already dark world grows darker by the minute. This is what the game is all about.

Clickolding has been getting a lot of attention since its release on July 17th, receiving widespread coverage in the gaming press and nearly 500 reviews on PC game store Steam, most of which have been very positive. But what is it about this strange piece of interactive art that’s only 40 minutes long that has captured the hearts of critics and players alike?

That’s partly because Clickolding is a pretty obvious allegory about voyeurism and the sex trade. The man in the chair indirectly enjoys someone else’s use of his precious counter, which he describes as a lover he can no longer satisfy (“We’ve been together a long time, but I just can’t click like you do.”). The relationship between the two people in the room is deliberately left ambiguous, but we know this is no hostage situation; players are free to leave the room when they want, and opening the hotel room door ends the game. And yet, the threat hangs over the room, like a bad smell.

The player character must perform certain physical acts that clearly arouse the seated man, though not overtly explicit (“You’re clicking steadily. That’s good.”). But there’s also emotional labor, as the man reveals aspects of his tattered private life. Power dynamics shift subtly: at various times you’re a servant, a caretaker, a partner, a stranger, all with barely any dialogue.

The game also captures a universal aspect of the experience of being confined to a hotel room for an extended period of time. While you’re there, it becomes a strange temporary home. It feels intimate (you undress there, you sleep there) yet alien and oddly fascinating. Who picked that floral wallpaper, that kitschy bedside lamp, that particular painting and why? How does the thermostat work? What’s outside the window? Visually, the room feels natural and detailed; it feels like a room from the latest Resident Evil or Call of Duty.

The clicker was born as an exploration of design principles: At this year’s San Francisco Game Developers Conference, members of studio Aggro Crab bought a clicker at a nearby thrift store, sat down with industry peers in a hotel lobby, and built a game to play with it. One of those peers was Xalavier Nelson Jr, creative director at the experimental indie studio. Strange Scaffoldingis responsible for such unique titles as Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and An Airport for Aliens Now Run By Dogs. An evening of oral history at WiredNelson was intrigued by the clicker’s hyper-repetitive appeal and began thinking about how he could use it in a new gaming project.

Clickolding continues the tradition of parody games like Cow Clicker and Cookie Clicker, which were designed to critique first-generation social media games like FarmVille, in which players perform endlessly repetitive tasks to accumulate resources and level up their characters. But by adopting mainstream game design elements—realistic visuals and a first-person camera—Clickolding extends the parody to all games driven by fast clicking, such as shooters and real-time strategy simulations. Here, the man in the chair becomes a metaphor for compelling game mechanics, enticing the player to get faster, better, and more accurate.

As you approach 10,000 clicks it starts to get boring, but you feel compelled, even obligated, to carry on while the man in the chair gives you a glimpse into his fractured life. It’s strange and mundane, uncomfortable and oddly comforting all at the same time. Perhaps the reason this game has attracted so much attention is that the monotony of clicking buttons in a boring motel allows your own thoughts, feelings and experiences to creep into your and the masked man’s room. Rarely have games given you so much room to be scared.

What to Play

in Arranger: Role Playing Puzzle Adventureis a cutesy RPG-like game in which you play a young social misfit setting out on his first journey outside the town he grew up in. Except the entire world is a grid of sliding tiles, and as you move, rows of tiles move with you. This turns combat into a sliding-block puzzle where you have to carry your sword to monsters to defeat them, and turns the regular towns, forests, and graveyards into giant game boards. It took me a while to get to grips with it, but the unique mix of story and puzzles is far more interesting than a match-3 puzzle. You may recognize the artist from his groundbreaking 2010 indie game Braid.

Available on: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5
Estimated play time: 6 hr