The new game from the maker of El Paso, Elsewhere is about a man in a chair in the corner of a dark hotel room, and yes, he wants to watch

Strange Scaffold, the studio behind weird-but-good games including An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, El Paso Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast, and Life Eater has announced its latest weird (but hopefully good) game: Clickolding, «a dark incremental narrative game about thumbing a tally counter to satisfy the distressing masked man sitting in the corner of your hotel room.»

Clickolding is being developed in partnership with Outersloth, a funding program for indie developers announced earlier this year by Innersloth, which apparently made so much money on Among Us that now it's just throwing it around at whoever needs some.

«They pitched such an unhinged and unsettling story it made an entire room erupt and somehow that ended up with them getting funding,» the Outersloth website says.

It's not entirely clear what that story is. There's a guy in a chair in a corner of a dark hotel room and he wants to watch, but he's not interested in the usual, uh, show: Instead, he wants to see you click one of those handheld counter things, repeatedly. The Steam listing implies you can leave if you want to, but «you don't get the money» if you do, and I can't help but notice that the man in the chair is packing a rod—a gun, I mean, an actual firearm—which I can only assume is there to encourage you to keep up the performance.

That's not much to go on, and the features list does not help in the clarity department: Clickolding includes a «lovingly detailed 3D tally counter,» weird jazz, a locked bathroom door, and «a surreal encounter with the Original Clickold in a land beyond space and thought.»

Yeah, I have no idea what to make of that, but I'm intrigued because Strange Scaffold has such a solid record. We called the Max Payne-esque El Paso, Elsewhere «one of the boldest, freshest games of the year» in 2023 (and also it's being made into a movie), while the more recent «horror fantasy kidnapping simulator» Life Eater left senior editor Chris Livingston not at all haunted by