By the end of my brief time playing the child of Clay, A free horror game available on stepI had taken my headphones off and was holding myself away from the screen as I selected Each action. It was a bright and cheary morning around 11 am, the Sun was shining, my coffee warm, and I was freaked the hell out.
The Children of Clay has a brilliant Premise: You’re basically the poor sap who gats got right at the beginning of a horror movie to introduce the conceit before the title card. Sequested in a Dark Office in the Bowels of a Museum or University Late At night, our unnamed protagonist opens a package from their colleague out in the field: a mysterious, prehistoric idol dugs up in The ural mountains.
This artifact is the star of the show, front and center on your desk at all times, starring you down as the game haunting ambient score and crushing atmosphere Smother You. The idol is a real object, crafted then digitized by developer Balazs Ronai, and at rest it calls to mind actual primeval european artifacts like the Venus of willndorfAs well as modern indee oddities like you might see in hylics or dreamwild. Its limited motion, mostly rotating on your desk as you examine it, has that wonderfully uncanny jerkiness that defines stop-motion animation.
The gameplay consists of using the tools at your desk to examine the idol, cross-reference what you find with an anthropology text RPG or Adventure Game. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that things take a very dark turns in your investment.
The child scared me more than any game I’ve played Since Amnesia: The Bunker, and I Remain Impressed at the Sheer Pound-For-Pound Audacity of Its: 15 Minutes of My Time and NO MONY DOWNY DOWNY DOWNY DOWNY DOWNY DOWNY DOWNY DOWNY DOWNY DOWNY Smart, Unique, and Unnerving Horror-Puzzle Experience. You can play the child for free, right now on SteamAnd if you’re a horror fan, you speck it to yourself to do so.