New Cult Hit Horror Game Raises Uncomfortable Questions About Your Gaming Habits

Clickolding is a darkly comic game from developer Strange Scaffold that combines horror elements with sexual voyeurism and its sometimes-lopsided power dynamics to make players question why they even play video games in the first place.

It asks this question by setting itself within the “clicker” genre, distilling video games to their most basic form—just clicking on a screen to reap a mild yet comforting psychological satisfaction. I haven’t spent much time playing clicker games—just enough to get the gist, plus a little more. The tantalizing sense of incremental achievement from putting in minimal effort is rather addictive, after all. That’s probably why this simple video game genre is so popular. It offers us all the chance to live out the dream of succeeding beyond our wildest imaginations while only having to lift a single finger again and again. You click your way to building a cookie empire in Cookie Clicker.

Banana, a barebones clicker that’s been dominating the Steam charts since its release in early June, is so simple that some think it’s secretly a crypto mining scam. And they’re not that far off, as the real pleasure of Banana comes from reselling in-game items (earned through minimal effort) in the Steam marketplace (sometimes for tens of real-life dollars). Of course, the developer gets a cut of every sale.

It’s a genre that began as a joke about the addictive pleasures of barebones video game feedback loops that also harness the power of those loops to keep you coming back for more. Since their inception, clicker games have been both a joke and the exact thing they ridicule.

Clickolding peers into the dark urges of the clicker genre to lay bare its pleasures and recontextualizes them into a dark, much more on-the-nose allegory. You are a man locked in a seedy motel room with another man who sits in a chair. The man in the chair wears an unnerving mask with an elongated, moose-like snout and sports a shirt stained with curiously rusty spots. You begin with a tally clicker in hand. The man in the mask wants you to click.

It soon becomes apparent that he derives some kind of pleasure from your clicks. When he tells you to stop as you hit 999 clicks, he writhes in a combination of torment and ecstasy. When he can’t take it anymore, he tells you to keep clicking. If you can make it to 10,000 clicks, the man in the chair will give you a stack of cash that your character needs for a medical procedure.

Clickolding doesn’t take long. The whole thing can be completed in 30 to 40 minutes, but narratively, it goes places in that time. Still, where its story goes is less interesting than what it’s trying to say about the clicker genre and video games as a whole—because what are video games if not a bunch of clicking? Clickolding wants you to wonder what you’re getting out of any of this.

By perverting the already odd pleasures we get from low-effort repetitive actions that offer the chance to enter a Zen state of utmost peace, are you getting what you want in the end, or is someone else? Are they preying on your desperate need for mundane repetition for a quick buck? Or is this a fair, mutually beneficial transaction where you have an opportunity to get something pleasurable that you can’t get anywhere else?

The easy answer is that it’s a two-way street. You give developers and publishers your money, and in return, they give you the clicks you crave. Clickolding offers a more complicated answer, since the situation it presents is much more precarious and, uh, wild. It suggests that maybe it’s more of a business negotiation straight from the Jack Donaghy school of dealmaking. Both parties can’t walk away happy, especially if one party’s definition of happiness is predicated on someone else feeling miserable. It’s made even more complicated by the fact that one party might have a god complex and a gun. There has to be a winner, even in a game of sexual voyeurism. The power dynamics have to be exploited to truly get off.

So why are you playing? Your character is doing it so they can pay for an expensive operation. But why are you doing this? There is a door that allows you to walk out and end the experience whenever you want. So why aren’t you walking out? Why are you clicking your mouse to satisfy the unusual urges of a potentially violent digital man who is suffering through a severe mental health episode brought on by a dream?

The answer is the same as the reason the clicker genre was created in the first place. The clicks are just too sweet, circumstances and consequences be damned.