The Clockwork Man: The Hidden World

Two years after her first adventures, the engineer Miranda Calomy and her robot assistant Sprocket are back to further explore their bizarre world, a strange version of Victorian England where modern technology is powered by steam and coiled springs. On her previous travels around the globe, she came across an unique artifact: an obsidian cylinder of unknown origin. This mysterious object is linked directly to a long-forgotten world, a place she must reach before a dangerous criminal and his thugs.

The Clockwork Man: The Hidden World is a hybrid game combining hidden object challenges with pure adventure gameplay and easy puzzles tailored for the casual market. As in most first-person, point-and-click adventure games, the main objective is to collect a series of inventory items and use them to solve the puzzles found on many locations. In the adventure sections, the cursor becomes context-sensitive, changing shape to indicate a possible action when hovering over an interactive hotspot. It turns into a hand when placed over an object that can be collected, transforms into a magnifying glass when passing over a scene portion with a zoom view, and changes into a pair of gears when floating over a place or device that can be manipulated in some way.

The inventory is a tray at the top where all the collected objects are stored, sliding down into view to show its contents, and automatically closing when the cursor is far away. The player has to drag and drop the items from it to logical places of the scenery to complete a task or perform a required action. Some of the key items are only received after completing one of the hidden object hunts, where a list of required objects appear at the bottom of the screen, and the player has to find and click on all of them. Some scenes can be scrolled vertically or panned horizontally, and also zoomed in and out. The screen scrolling can be performed by clicking the two arrows inside a circle at the bottom interface, or by using the keyboard arrow keys, mouse wheel or clicking and dragging the cursor.

The extensive help system has several different types of hints, all available as buttons set on a semi-circle at the bottom-left. New buttons are gradually added as the game progresses, showing up as upgrades for the robot Sprocket. The locator shows the position of a random item, the database displays a picture of a selected object, the sonar shows briefly all the objects in a scene and the progressive hint gives a clue about the next objective. They all take a variable amount of time to recharge after use. Mini-games can be found on certain locations, taking place on a separate screen where a mechanism of some sort has to be manipulated to solve them.