Clockwork Knight was my pick for October's TR theme of 5th gen platformers. It wasn't exactly my first choice, but everything else I could think of I'd either already played or is weirdly very rare and expensive here in Japan (annoyingly enough). But this is a game I've been meaning to give another try for quite some time. I tried it briefly back on my American Saturn many years ago, but I never gave a ton of effort or time to beating it. I guess I've gotten a lot better at games since then, since I managed to beat the (mechanically identical) Japanese version in only 80 minutes, but I still enjoyed my time with it well enough.

Clockwork Knight was a very early Saturn release and one clearly designed to show off the audio and 3D graphical capabilities. The story is a very simple "knight must rescue the princess" sort of affair, but the added spin is that everything is toys~. You're the titular clockwork knight off to save the princess toy from whatever mysterious evil force in the house kidnapped her and turned a bunch of the other toys evil. It's a very simple story told mostly through dialogue between levels and unvoiced cutscenes, but it does the job it needs to for the kind of game this is.

And the kind of game this is a quite short 2.5D platformer. It's only 8 levels with 5 bosses, and I can certainly see why it didn't exactly blow people away when it dropped back in '94/95, and I can't imagine it made Japanese players feel terribly satisfied with their Saturn purchases compared to what the SNES was getting back then. You have some levels with maze elements, but it's ultimately really nothing special. You have a jump, a dash, a short-range melee attack, and that's all she wrote. You can get coins to play a ball-and-cup game between levels, and being pretty good at ball-and-cup games, I was able to get a crap ton of extra lives, so getting a game over was never a terrible concern of mine. That said, the game is pretty tough, especially in its later levels, but a lot of that feels more down to less than stellar stage design rather than a game that's both tightly designed and challenging (not to mention how you completely restart a stage upon death, and more health is quite uncommon).

The presentation is quite nice, and is definitely one of the things Clockwork Knight was created to show off. The vocal song that the game opens with is fun and poppy, and the other tracks the game has are also that 90's Sega brand of groovy and fun. The graphics seem to have taken the same approach that Pixar did with Toy Story: if all of our 3D-rendered CGI looks like plastic, why not make a game about toys? The toys have bright, colorful designs that are a delight to the eye and have unique and fun designs. However, the one drawback of that is that the 2.5D art style can at times make hitboxes not terribly clear.


Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Clockwork Knight is and always has been an okay game, but I don't think it's worth giving time to for most people. There's just really nothing special or unique about it outside of its historical significance to the Saturn to justify slapping down the time or the money to give it a go. If you do give it a go and you like 2D platformers, you'll probably enjoy it well enough, but it's one that, like me, you'll probably put back on the shelf forever and seldom think about again.