Clive 'N' Wrench

My gut reaction after the first hour with Clive 'N' Wrench was genuine curiosity mixed with quiet frustration, which turns out to be almost exactly the experience the rest of the game delivers. Developer Rob Wass reportedly spent around twelve years building this largely solo, and that context matters because you can feel both the love and the limitations pressing against each other throughout every world. The inspirations are unmistakable: Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro, Super Mario 64, and basically anything colourful that came out of the late N64 and PS2 era. If that sentence just made you nostalgic, read on. If it made you think of sharper, more polished modern alternatives, pump the brakes. The structure is classic collectathon. Eleven time-period-themed worlds branch off a central hub, and in each one you hunt down Ancient Stones (the game's equivalent of Stars or Jiggies) alongside hundreds of pocket-watch collectibles that trail you toward the bigger prizes. Each zone comes with its own boss fight that demands a unique mechanic to clear, which is a genuine highlight. Some bosses shift the camera to a side-on 2D plane; others use momentum and spacing in ways the open levels rarely ask of you. It is in those moments that the game clicks, and you can see exactly the kind of experience Wass was reaching for. The world variety is also legitimately creative: a Honey I Shrunk the Kids-style shrunken house, ancient Egypt, Victorian London, a mob-run swamp casino, prehistoric ice age. These are not stock platformer themes, and exploring them carries a genuine sense of personality. The problems, though, are hard to overlook. Clive feels weighted and slow off the ground, with a standard jump that consistently falls just short of platforms in a way that nudges you toward the long jump or high jump instead. Button inputs occasionally drop entirely, which means deaths that feel arbitrary rather than earned. Hitboxes are inconsistent, boss fights can spike in difficulty without adequate health recovery, and the camera has occasional moments of quiet rebellion. The cutscenes are stiff pantomime with no voice acting, which makes character introductions feel half-finished rather than charmingly retro. None of this breaks the game outright, but it adds up to a friction that wears on you especially once the collectible loop starts feeling repetitive. The Ancient Stones, your key progress items, are too often stumbled upon rather than earned through clever design, which undercuts the satisfaction the genre depends on. What saves it is attitude. There are album-cover parodies tucked into level dressing, cameos from recognisable indie-platformer characters, a soundtrack that genuinely evokes the Rare era, and a density of Easter eggs that rewards slow, curious exploration. Clive's hat changes costume to match each time period, a small touch that never stops being charming. The character animation, particularly for the main duo, is surprisingly fluid for a project of this scale. And the collectathon loop, janky as it sometimes is, still has that one-more-stone pull that kept me returning after every frustrating session. On PC specifically, the experience sits at a Mixed rating on Steam for good reason. Genre devotees who grew up 100-percenting Banjo-Tooie and will tolerate rough edges for that specific flavour of nostalgia will find more to love here than critics did. Anyone coming in cold, or anyone whose tolerance for floaty controls and intermittent bugs is low, will struggle to stay patient long enough to reach the parts that actually work.

Alex · Scout Team

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