Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink

My honest first reaction to Clockwork Tales was mild skepticism - Artifex Mundi's catalog is enormous, and hidden object games can feel cynically produced. A couple of hours in, that skepticism was mostly gone. This is a HOPA (Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure) that genuinely works hard to be more than the sum of its parts, and mostly succeeds. You play as Agent Evangeline Glass, a spy dispatched to the mountain town of Hochwald to find her missing colleague Dr. Ambrose Ink, who vanished while investigating a series of earthquakes tearing cities apart. The villain is General Engineer Barber, a steampunk-flavored authoritarian with militaristic soldiers and a secret tremor machine underground. The plot is thin on characterization - Glass and Ink are pleasant but flat, and the side characters border on forgettable - but the steampunk setting is handled with real visual craft. Locations move from the village inn through a foreboding castle and into underground volcanic labs, each rendered in hand-painted art that makes the world feel alive even when the writing does not. The puzzle design is where this earns its keep. Rather than leaning entirely on traditional hidden object scenes, Clockwork Tales mixes in fragmented object hunts (called FROGs, where you locate picture-cued pieces spread across multiple locations), gear-rotation locks, wire-circuit puzzles, pipe-routing challenges, and inventory-combination sequences. Matthew, a mechanical raven companion, lets you retrieve items from out-of-reach spots, which adds a small but satisfying layer to item hunts. The hint system recharges on a timer, and all minigames can be skipped after a short wait - so the difficulty ceiling is entirely self-imposed. Expert mode increases hint cooldowns and penalizes frantic clicking, but even that is not especially demanding. Spread across the main game and a bonus prequel chapter starring Dr. Ink, total playtime lands somewhere between three and five hours depending on how liberally you use hints. The shortcomings are real and worth flagging. Voice acting is inconsistent - the main characters hold up, but several supporting roles slip into unintentional comedy. Some late-game inventory puzzles drift toward moon-logic territory, where the intended solution requires more leaps than the environment earns. Replay value is near zero once you know the puzzle solutions, and the difficulty options do not change the experience enough to justify a second run for most players. There are also 30 collectable Steambugs scattered across scenes - animated mechanical insects hidden per screen - which add a light scavenger-hunt layer for achievement hunters, though 11 of the 19 Steam achievements are missable, so completionists should keep a guide open. If you want a chill two-to-four-hour puzzle session with an attractive steampunk coat of paint and enough variety to stay engaging, this delivers that cleanly. If you need a long game, deep story, or sharp writing, look further. It sits comfortably as a low-friction genre entry rather than a flagship, and it knows it.

Alex · Scout Team

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