Pocket Watch

I have a soft spot for studios that ship games like other people ship newsletters, and Sokpop Collective, four developers out of the Netherlands, do exactly that. Pocket Watch is one of their more ambitious outings: a time-loop puzzle adventure set on a tropical island facing volcanic annihilation, and it carries more emotional weight per pixel than its humble price tag suggests. You play as a duck. A mysterious crow recruits you, the day is ticking down, and the only way to prevent the island's destruction is to acquire the titular pocket watch at an in-game auction and use it to rewind time. That setup might sound breezy, but the opening half-hour has genuine teeth: the auction requires five coins scattered across the island, the save function doesn't unlock until you secure the watch, and achievement data shows that nearly half of all players accidentally reach the bad ending before they understand what's happening. Stick with it. Once the loop opens up, the game transforms from a slightly frantic scavenger hunt into something much warmer: learning the daily routines of twenty-plus animal residents, reading the tides to reach new map areas, and piecing together a conspiracy that the crow has been quietly steering you toward all along. The design vocabulary here is clearly Majora's Mask filtered through a two-person weekend jam. Puzzles ask you to observe, revisit, and experiment rather than just collect and combine, and most of them land at a satisfying difficulty: approachable but not insulting. The tide mechanic, which opens and closes different parts of the island as the in-game day progresses, is a small stroke of craft that a bigger studio might have over-explained into tedium. Here it's just there, elegant and quiet. The collectibles, coins, moons, and gems scattered across the map, reward thorough exploration without gatekeeping the main story. There are rough edges. Movement and light platforming sections feel a little slippery, and the keyboard controls, arrow keys plus X and Z, will frustrate anyone on a non-QWERTY layout. Controller support is present and genuinely helps. Some players have also flagged the choppy animation and camera movement as causing discomfort, so if you're sensitive to that, it's worth watching a few minutes of footage first. Guidance in the early game can be thin: the crow drops hints, but the step that requires you to seek out the auction isn't always communicated clearly enough. None of that dims what this game does well. Pocket Watch knows its own length, runs about three to four hours, and ends cleanly with multiple outcomes depending on how thoroughly you've played. That restraint is rarer than it should be. For something that sits in the Sokpop catalogue between patreon drops, it has a distinct mood: sun-warm, slightly melancholy in the way that any story built around a single doomed day has to be, and genuinely funny in its animal dialogue. If you've never spent time with Sokpop's work, this is a fine door in.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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