Have you heard of Second Order ? No..... well you will be surprised that this indie studio is made up of two veterans in the gaming industry. They have previously worked on the trials games and then decided to start their own company and work on their own projects. Claybook has been in early access for almost a year and fully released on the 31 August 2018 for xbox one,ps4 and steam.
In the game you play as a piece of clay and you can play as different shapes of clay to get through certain parts of levels that requires that shape. For instance when going up a slope you would use the cube form instead of a sphere because using the cube you can get traction easier, by doing this you would move up the slope more swiftly. Levels are done really well, each level has its own unique objectives tasking the player to finish a whole host of tasks.That brings me to my next point speaking of traction, this game is obviously using clay to build the games levels. What I didn't know is how the clay would react to me moving against it. They really made the clay feel like it would in real life, even with the way it moved when I would dig into it.
I at first thought the whole deal with clay wasn't going to work properly, I thought all the surfaces would have been really hard just like everything else I played. When I first saw it I told myself here's another game trying to be innovative, but when I played it I could see the dedication and hard work that had gone into making this game work as well as it did. Well something could be said about the amount of levels in the game it might not be on the high end. What could be pointed out is that all these levels are different and provides a new challenge to the player. One issue I had was getting use to how the camera moves, for some reason I struggled a lot positioning it properly and I would lose track of where I was going making certain levels very frustrating but in the end I got use it.
At the end of the day I really cant say anything bad about this game,all points was done perfectly. From how the game looks visually, to how core mechanics work and the amount of time and effort that went into making every level fun and unique. Something we don't see enough of these days, so it clearly shows why this game took so long to fully release. If this is what these guys can do, I hope their next project is bigger and better because they have clearly shown it here. I really couldn't recommend this more to anymore even though its on the short side it does deserve your time.
I rate this a 8/10
