Now Playing: The Last Clockwinder (VR)

The Last Clockwinder is a relatively small but clever VR puzzle game. You play as Jules, a character who has travelled to an ancient clocktower constructed within a giant tree in order to repair and restore it. Jules has her own history with the clocktower and its previous guardian – the titular clockwinder – and that’s something you’ll learn about as you progress and listen to various audio logs throughout the different ‘rooms’.

There’s a pretty neat sci-fi world aspect to the game that’s not really explored to any great depth but it does provide an interesting backdrop to the more personal story that’s driving the action. And it’s a pretty neat little story that keeps you intrigued and engaged from beginning to end thanks to a snappy script and some good VA.

Visually, TLC isn’t amazing but it’s good enough for what it’s doing. The interior of the tree and all of the rooms look nice. And there’s no loading in the game. You essentially have a ‘base’ room from which you can flip a switch and another room will roll up before you. There’s a map to choose which room you want, and this map also serves to chart your progression through the game.

Some rooms can only be unlocked after completing key story objectives and others require various resources. The resource rooms are the most important as these are where you’ll find most of the puzzles. They fall into two categories – seed rooms to produce fruit seeds and fruit rooms to harvest the fruit crop.

In order to repair the clocktower you’ll need a lot of fruit but producing all those seeds and harvesting all that fruit is a massive task and although I guess you could technically do most of it by yourself if you really wanted to, the selling point of TLC and the best way to solve its puzzles is by using an army of robot clones.

In the very first room you’ll gain a pair of special gloves that allow you to record your actions. Once recorded, a robot clone appears and follows your recorded action exactly as you saved it. This will probably sound kind of weird when I describe it. It’s the sort of thing that you don’t really wrap your head around until you see it in action for yourself.

So let’s say you need to take a fruit and place it in a collector which uses a pump to process the fruit. You could, like I said, do it entirely yourself – pick up the fruit, carry it to the collector and then work the pump. But when you need 250 fruit to unlock the next room, it’s best to create a little help.

So what do you do? You record yourself picking the fruit and tossing it towards the collector. You then record yourself catching the fruit and placing it inside. You then record yourself working the pump to process it. And now you can stand back and watch 3 robot clones do this work for you. But wait, there’s more! Why not plant more fruit and create more clones to pick that fruit? And rather than use a clone to catch it, maybe you can aim and throw it directly into the collector?

Each puzzle room has three challenges to produce a set number of fruit / seeds per minute with a set number of clones. These challenges are optional and aren’t necessary to progress. If you ignore them and just focus on generating the minimum number of resources to move to the next room you can probably clear the game in just a couple of hours. But if, like me, you’re a bit of a perfectionist and you can’t resist a challenge then you’ll happily spend a fair amount of time trying to optimise every room so that they’re as efficient as possible, generating the maximum number of resources with the minimum number of clones.

The puzzles become more complex as you go requiring you to combine different fruit or use various tools. The type of fruit you’re collecting also changes and each presents its own challenge. You also gain the ability to record clones for different lengths of time which then factors into the tasks they’re performing and how you sync them up.

Overall, I really enjoyed the puzzles in TLC. They use the cloning feature in a way that’s clever and fun and makes you feel very satisfied when you set everything up and it all runs like . . . well, clockwork.

That’s not to say the game doesn’t have any issues, however. A few of the later puzzles can be a little frustrating due to the type of fruit you’re dealing with. There’s one that floats and requires you to push it in the direction you want it to move but it can feel a little random if it actually goes exactly where you want it to.

And a lot of the puzzles, if you want to solve them as efficiently as possible, require a lot of tossing objects from one clone to another. But, as I’m sure I’ve said many times before in VR reviews, throwing objects in VR can be very tricky. With no sense of weight you have to do a fair bit of trial and error to figure out the correct power / angle for your throw.

You might have to spend a few minutes recording, deleting, recording and deleting a clone as you try to get the throw just right. Combine that with fruit that may float or bounce in unpredictable ways and it can be a tad frustrating at times. I also encountered an odd issue in one of the seed rooms in which whenever I would return to the room, one of my clones would be out of sync with the chain I’d set up forcing me to record them again. Thankfully, it only happened in this one room and once you’ve cleared these rooms you don’t really need to keep going back to them.

Overall, The Last Clockwinder is a very clever and fun little puzzle game. It may be short – even if you strive to complete all the challenges you probably won’t take more than 10 hours or so – but it’s also a game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. The puzzle mechanics progress nicely and none of the puzzles drag. And the plot doesn’t get in the way. It acts like a simple thread stringing everything together quite nicely. If you want a VR puzzle game then The Last Clockwinder is certainly worth picking up.

7/10