I saw Clive’n’Wrench briefly covered in a YouTube video. It struck me as a fun platformer game, so when it finally went on sale on Steam I took the plunge. I do appreciate indie games are starting to move from the 2D, pixel art, NES era onto the PS1 era, because those are the games I grew up with.

As this game makes abundantly clear, it’s a love letter to the classic platformer collect-a-thons of the late 90s/early 2000s, the games of my childhood. The gameplay is a hodgepodge of classic platformer mechanics. Each level is laid out like a sandbox for you to explore, like Sly Cooper or Spyro. There’s tokens to collect in each area, like Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie. The boss levels take cues from Crash Bandicoot. And this game is filthy with references to those classics, like graffiti that says “It’s Tail Time” or the Bear & Bird Tavern. My favorite reference is an achievement for climbing to the top of a tree in the swamp level that says “Least there wasn’t a kite to fight”, which has to be a reference to the Toy Story 2 game, which was my favorite platformer growing up. They have a Lara Croft spoof in the Egypt level named Luara Cruz, which was originally going to be Lara’s name during the production of Tomb Raider.

So, this game attempts to imitate those classic platformers, but does it succeed? Unfortunately, I found Clive to be a little too floaty when jumping. I’m guessing they went for a bit of a momentum-based system, because Clive doesn’t stop on a dime like Crash Bandicoot. It makes the levels with precision platform jumps annoying. The double jump can be a bit finicky, keeping Clive from getting the full distance of the jump and landing you in the drink. There’s also a bit of a lag in all of the inputs. That could partly be because I’m using a PS4 controller plugged into my laptop, but it’s usually pretty solid. Basically, don’t go in expecting snappy platforming. Luckily the checkpoint system is more than forgiving, you only lose real estate when you get sent back. You keep all of your collected pocket watches, this game’s coins, and any enemies you’ve defeated stay down. Clive can swim, which I didn’t expected. They don’t rely on the swimming controls much, there’s only a few times it’s required. They are simple, but not fun to use.

Each zone ends with a boss level, which are more straight forward affairs. The first boss I found to be the hardest. It felt like the Dingodile boss fight from Crash 3, where you have to run around a ring, but you’re on a dock so you can easily fall into the water and get a game over. It took me several tries to get past him. After that the bosses were much more manageable. A lot of them weren’t straight up fights with a boss health bar, but gauntlet runs. You’d have to simply reach the boss to win. A few gauntlet puzzles like that are fine for platformer game, but I would’ve preferred a few more actual boss fights. The pirate boss fight was another rough level due to the floaty controls. It was basically this game’s version of Slippery Climb. The boss fight after that was a run towards the camera Crash Bandicoot chase that went on for way too long. It turned into a lot of trial and error as you had to learn the best route to avoid the lava chasing you. It wasn’t a fun time. The final boss fight is a 3-part fight and it was pretty good. There was a plane section that actually controlled really well. The final final boss was against the clock which was a bit anti-climactic, but not terrible.

The art style of this game seems to pull the most from Banjo Kazooie with the character designs, with world designs that are more Crash Bandicoot in nature. All of the characters are some type of critter, mostly rabbits. All of the characters speak in gibberish. Some of the furrier characters aren’t done favors by the graphics. This game goes the Crash 3 Warped route and uses time travel as a way to frame each level. The first level sees you in an oversized house and gave me Andy’s Room vibes. Then there’s levels set in Victorian London, Prohibition New Orleans, Ancient Greece, The Old West, Medieval England, etc. They are all fun and distinct enough. I would’ve liked to see the levels a little bigger or more fleshed out, but I understand this was an indie dev. They definitely have a “playpark imitation” feeling to them.

As a platformer game, there’s not much of a story. Thanks to his smart sister, Clive and his pet monkey Wrench are traveling through time chasing an evil doctor who is using time travel to exploit resources and become a dictator. That’s really all the pretense you need. The end of the game sees the evil doctor and Wrench falling into a fire and both seemingly die, but then Wrench comes back with a robot body? Or maybe he was a robot the whole time? The game never really develops the characters in any meaningful way, just relying on the classic archetypes. The humor in the game is very pun based. And there were plenty of joke signs that got a chuckle out of me.

All in all, I really hate to dunk on Clive’n’Wrench because it’s very clear what they lacked in skill, they more than made up for with passion. I don’t know if it was, but this game feels like someone’s first try at game developing. It doesn’t feel like an early access, rush job to make a buck, but it also lacks the polish of the games it’s imitating. If they are able to make a Clive’n’Wrench 2, I’d hope they’d learn from this experience and deliver something much more engaging. If you are a fan of collect-a-thon platforms looking for something that appeals to your nostalgia, even if it’s a bit rough around the edges, I can recommend this, but maybe for a sale price.