By the end of my brief time playing The Children of Clay, a free horror game available on Steam, I had taken my headphones off and was holding myself away from the screen as I selected each action. It was a bright and cheery 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 gets got right at the beginning of a horror movie to introduce the conceit before the title card drops. Sequestered 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 dug up in the Ural Mountains.
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This artifact is the star of the show, front and center on your desk at all times, staring you down as the game’s 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 Willendorf, as well as modern indie 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-referencing what you find with an anthropology textbook cleverly implemented as a keyword search system like an old school RPG or adventure game. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that things take a very dark turn in your investigation.
The Children of Clay 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 it: 15 minutes of my time and no money down for a shockingly smart, unique, and unnerving horror-puzzle experience. You can play The Children of Clay for free, right now on Steam, and if you’re a horror fan, you owe it to yourself to do so.