Clockwise

My first honest reaction to Clockwise was something close to respect for its restraint. In a corner of the horror genre that reflexively reaches for ear-splitting stings and closet monsters, pheenix93 set out to build dread the old-fashioned way: through darkness, spatial disorientation, and the creeping sensation that something unseen is tracking your movement through the rooms. That is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds, and Clockwise lands it more often than its mixed review score implies. At its core this is a first-person atmospheric horror-puzzle experience played out across obscure rooms and shifting hallways in a haunted house that never quite resolves into a coherent floorplan. That ambiguity is the point. You progress through corridors and chambers populated by what the developer calls servants of darkness, picking at environmental riddles - secret passages, interactable objects, rooms that change between visits. The structure is procedurally varied across runs, meaning no two playthroughs generate identical geometry, and the game includes a boss encounter that community players on itch.io flagged as a genuine highlight. Expect a single session to clock in around 90 minutes, possibly shorter if you read the environment carefully. The sound design is where the craft shows most clearly. The slight ambient noises, the way the soundscape tightens before something shifts - these are the tools of a developer who studied how silence creates anticipation rather than how a loud cue triggers a flinch. One Steam community member admitted to quitting multiple times mid-session out of fear before finishing, which I find more telling than any aggregate score. That kind of involuntary physical reaction is difficult to manufacture on a micro-budget, running on Unreal Engine 3 of all things. What holds it back is honest and worth stating plainly. The game sits at a mixed rating from a small pool of reviews, and the criticisms tend to cluster around repetition - the procedural variation only goes so far before the rooms start to feel like reshuffled versions of the same dark corridor. There is no save feature mid-session, which caused friction for some players who lost progress after exiting. And the darkness, while atmospheric in intent, occasionally tips into navigational frustration where the puzzle is less "figure out the room" and more "figure out that you can see anything at all." These are not dealbreakers for the audience this is aimed at, but they are real texture to manage. Clockwise is the kind of small game I feel protective of. It was built by someone who was tired of horror games that felt disposable and wanted to make something that lingered. The result is imperfect, brief, and slightly janky at the edges - but it knows what it is trying to be, and in the moments where the atmosphere locks in, it earns the comparison the developer drew to SCP-inspired horror. If you have an appetite for slow-burn, first-person dread and can forgive the limitations of a solo passion project, there is something real here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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