Cloning Clyde

I have a soft spot for games that commit fully to a dumb, wonderful premise, and Cloning Clyde commits hard. You play as the world's least cautious man, who signed up for genetic experiments at Dupliclone Inc. in exchange for twenty dollars. Naturally, the cloning machine malfunctioned, there are now hundreds of you wandering the facility, and the whole building is in lockdown. What follows across 35 side-scrolling levels is one of the more charming puzzle-platformers to come out of the mid-2000s XBLA era, now living quietly on Steam. The core loop is built on two interlocking ideas. First, you can clone yourself using machines scattered through each level, then switch control between any of your copies at will. Stacking three clones onto a pressure plate, or routing one through a flooded corridor while another handles the controls above, creates a genuinely satisfying multi-body logic puzzle that feels closer to Lemmings than to a typical platformer. Second, DNA combiners let you splice Clyde with animals: merge with a chicken and you can glide, merge with a frog and you can swim, merge with a sheep for big jumps, or merge with a TNT barrel if you feel like solving a door problem with extreme prejudice. The mutations are temporary and level-scoped, which keeps each stage feeling like its own small puzzle box rather than a power-fantasy escalator. The PC port is faithful but carries the seams of its console origin. A gamepad feels noticeably more natural than keyboard controls, though the keyboard bindings are remappable and functional enough. The in-game audio is thin during play, a real miss for atmosphere, and the graphics have the soft, 2.5D cartoon-clay look of mid-Xbox-360-era budget titles. None of that is a dealbreaker, but anyone expecting a remaster will be disappointed. What you get is the original game, intact, with Steam achievements and cloud saves bolted on. The difficulty sits in a comfortable casual register. Completing levels is rarely frustrating, but chasing the optional collectibles, specifically the 156 scattered Killer Kenn action figures and the 240-plus rescuable clones, adds real replay texture for anyone who wants it. Guiding large herds of clones to the exit vents can tip from satisfying into repetitive around the midpoint, and critics noted the same thing back at the original 2006 launch. The Xbox 360 release earned favorable aggregate scores, and the Steam community sits at 92 percent positive across its reviews, which for a 15-year-old port is a quiet but honest endorsement. This is not a game that will redefine what you think a platformer can do. It knows exactly how long it wants to be, delivers its jokes with a straight face, and ends before it overstays its welcome. For anyone who missed the XBLA era, or who wants a low-stakes afternoon with actual mechanical ideas underneath the cartoon exterior, Cloning Clyde is worth the time.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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