I tend to really enjoy point and click games such as Clam Man. That is to say games that value story over puzzles. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good puzzle, but many point and click games have puzzles that lack logic and are just an exercise in trial and error. Clam Man has one puzzle that I thought bordered on this but overall it was more about the story; characters; and humour. I will give a shout out to the puzzle on figuring out who loud mouth is as one that was very well done. All the clues you need are given to you and your hand isn’t held but it also isn’t sadistic in it’s difficulty. It also gives you an option for an easier difficulty for it if you want. On the other hand the puzzle in figuring out a combo to a safe felt very irrational and while I could see what they were going for I couldn’t figure out how they arrived to their solution. The story was fairly good. I was a bit goofy at times but it was never meant to be taken seriously. One thing that would have been nice was a bit more detail near the end as the last fifteen minutes or so felt kind of rushed with a lot of plot crammed in but not much detail. The humour was fantastic and kept me smiling throughout.
I played Clam man on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. The game auto saves each time you move to a new scene or area. There is just one save slot that gets overwritten each time. The time between saves is decent though and didn’t present any issues although I will always prefer a manual save system. There is one graphics setting along with your resolution. There is only one volume setting instead of having separate options for effects and music. It’s also strange in that the volume setting doesn’t kick in until I got to the main menu which means that until then the intro music was a lot louder than after. I couldn’t monitor frame rate but I didn’t notice any lag or slow down.
Game Engine: Unity
Disk Space Used: 1.5 GB
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
Graphics Settings: Fantastic, 2560x1440
GPU Usage: 58-100 %
VRAM Usage: 866-1215 MB
CPU Usage: 7-18 %
RAM Usage: 2.5-2.9 GB
Overall I would recommend Clam Man if you want a game with great humour and a good story. If you want a plethora of puzzles you will be disappointed. The puzzles that were there were a bit of a mixed bag as well as the technical aspects left a little to be desired. These issues didn’t detract enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game though. I finished the game in one hour and fifty three minutes. I paid $2.10 CAD for it and feel this was easily a steal although the full current price of $11.49 CAD is a fine price for it.
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 23.1.4 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.4.6-zen1-1-zen | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165hz