Some games are extremely upfront in their presentation. A glance at some details, and it can give you enough confidence in what to expect. This is what I thought when I first saw Clockwork Ambrosia, a metroidvania built on the core mechanics of gun tweaking and customization. Starting as a secondary project way back in 2011, this is a game born from a single inspiration. One that it never strayed from for more than 10 years.

Unsurprisingly enough, the aforementioned inspiration is Super Metroid. But not because of its gameplay structure, because of its charge combos. Nathan Hiemenz, the Realmsoft studio founder and team lead, wanted to expand on that idea. What if you had an entire system meant to change how weapons behaved? And from then on, the game had its vision locked in place.

Hiemenz does cite other inspirations, too. When it comes to movement and game feel, he tried to make the game more Mega Man X instead of Metroid. When it comes to the gun builds, he wanted it to feel as satisfying as pulling off the right combo for Slay the Spire. With these foundations set in place, work on Clockwork Ambrosia began.

Clockwork Ambrosia’s Engine Problems…

One last thing that needs to be mentioned before talking about the game itself: Realmsoft uses its own in-house engine, one that was built from scratch. While usually engine choices aren’t relevant enough to point out, in this case, there are a couple of problems that make it inevitable. Mainly, that the game will likely launch without a Steam Deck verification.

At the time production on the game started, smaller game engines for indie productions weren’t as robust as they are today. The decision to use their own background in programming to make their own engine seemed like a sensible choice then. However, Clockwork Ambrosia was never a full-time endeavor for the team. During the time the game was in development, the industry saw the release of the Steam Deck and a slight rise in the popularity of Linux as an OS choice because of it.

The devs have already confirmed that compatibility patches are on the priority roadmap. Although, until said changes come, the game will be very buggy for Unix environments. No amount of Wine tweaking can make up for an engine that no one other than Realmsoft knows what it does.

Playing on Linux Systems Will Require Patience

I use CachyOS as my daily driver. I played most of Clockwork Ambrosia in it, and the game definitely broke with a certain frequency. Constant frame drops and weird glitches kept popping up, no amount of fiddling made it any better. Proton versions, windowed, exclusive fullscreen, capped framerate, nothing stopped the game from eventually just breaking. The upside is that glitches never softlocked me or made me lose progress, but they are annoyances.

To fix said issues, I had to restart the game frequently. It is mostly playable if you’re the type of person that enjoys janky titles regularly. But since the game is only available on PC, you can only get a smooth “console-like” experience on Windows. While I haven’t extensively tested the game on my Windows partition, I couldn’t replicate any of the glitches I’ve seen during my time playing on Linux.

Keeping it Simple

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the game itself. First and foremost, this is a very gameplay-focused experience. Your first moments in the game consist of a short cutscene showing Iris, the game’s aero-engineer protagonist, flying on her blimp and unceremoniously being attacked by a mechanical dragon. After surviving the crash, a single text box appears to tell you “Iris’ vacation was off to a great start”. That is the level of complexity that you can expect from the game’s narrative.

It’s safe to say that the story isn’t the focus of Clockwork Ambrosia, which is par for the course, honestly. In fact, it’s rare that a metroidvania emphasizes story rather than non-linear exploration and sharp controls. I can’t exactly fault an independent production for deciding to allocate their dev time accordingly, and leave the story as nothing but context to why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Credit where it is due, there are a few recurring jokes that can be genuinely funny, but otherwise there’s very little to be discussed on this front. Even when it comes to other artistic qualities, they can all be summed up as “sufficient.” Visuals are good, if not a tad derivative. The soundtrack is fine, with a few tracks that can get annoying if you linger in that biome for too long. Sound effects are probably the most engaging part of the non-gameplay package, which isn’t that surprising since they’re pretty much needed to make each gun sound and feel unique.

The Engineer is Engi-Here!

So let’s address the flagship mechanic, the gun crafting. As the core of the game, you can definitely feel the depth of this system. The game only offers you 4 guns, but each one of them can function in many unique ways depending on the parts you find and how you combine them. The biggest point in Clockwork Ambrosia’s favor, there is no “2% more poison damage” modifications. Every part you slot matters, and combining them effectively is where the challenge lies.

A Mega Man-like plasma rifle, a pair of classic cowboy revolvers, a grenade launcher, and a rocket launcher are just a few of the weapons you can utilize. The initial plasma rifle starts exactly like the most vanilla Mega Man X weapon you can imagine. Three rapid shots with a cooldown, and a stronger charged shot. By the end of the game, you can tweak it to become a never-ending machine gun, an extremely powerful charged shot that one-shots almost anything, a balanced three-shot burst that is versatile in both DPS and ease of aim, or maybe just a cone shotgun burst to clear the screen.

That’s just one example; each weapon can be modified with drastically different effects. Some of these include crowd control, burst damage, sustained DPS, utility, plus the possibility of firing at weird angles and hitting enemies from the safety of cover. The biggest limitation is your own experimentation with the add-ons. Some effects aren’t immediately obvious, and I couldn’t thoroughly test if some effects are just poorly worded or bugged, but they undeniably offer plenty to fiddle with and increase your power.

The only real problem with this system is that combat can quickly become unbalanced the more as you continue to test out different builds. At around 70% completion, I got a loadout for a grenade and a rocket, both of which allowed me to clear rooms without effort and kill bosses in less than 10 seconds. I don’t fully consider that a downside, but it can be a deal-breaker for any player who enjoys the challenge that metroidvanias offer in their combat (like Tevi, for example).

Overall, Clockwork Ambrosia does a great job with its core mechanics. Finding new parts, expanding your slots, and trying different combinations are all really engaging parts of the gameplay. While it’s an undeniably rich feature worthy of praise, there’s a second aspect to any metroidvania that’s also important: the progression and movement.

Lackluster Exploration

Here’s my personal bias when evaluating metroidvanias: I vastly prefer titles with tools that give an absurd amount of freedom in their use, over ones that give limited utility. When abilities are little more than glorified keys to specific doors, it leads to a suffocating design where you feel like you’re just playing a linear platform with a ton of backtracking. Meanwhile, a game that gives you enough freedom to sometimes break the sequence of events without softlocking itself is arguably the ideal that every game in the genre should strive for.

Clockwork Ambrosia picks the safe option of being perfectly in the midpoint between those. None of the abilities are particularly interesting or new, and in the first hours of the game, you’re heavily corralled into a specific path. While the game does open up after a few upgrades, it also commits the cardinal sin of making the double jump a late-game unlock. For every good idea in its movement system, there’s a limitation that hampers what you can do with it.

The end result is a game that technically delivers on the promise of non-linear exploration, but rarely rewards a player who goes out of their way or thinks outside of the box. When a chest is on the horizon, but it feels like you need an air dash to get it, there’s no point in trying to get it without one. Even though there are a few times you can “bend the rules,” so to speak, it’s usually not worth the time spent doing complicated tricks when the power-up you need usually isn’t far ahead.

In other words, it’s a game that clears a minimum standard of non-linearity for it to be enjoyable, but it’s not too creative on that front to make it truly memorable. For all your player expression needs, please tweak your guns to become the most laughably broken version of themselves.

A Relatively Safe Experience

Up until this point, I haven’t mentioned that the game has armor equips and a (very rudimentary) upgrade system, and that’s deliberate. While I’m not entirely opposed to mechanics that force you to farm for item drops, Clockwork Ambrosia does nothing really interesting with it. While guns give you ultimate freedom, your armor has a very obvious “best in slot” choice every time. Since the game doesn’t even have a bestiary to tell you who drops what and where, you’re incentivized to always hoard and never upgrade things you aren’t using. It is a system that exists in this game, and the only one I would call “half-baked”.

The end result is a metroidvania with around 20 to 25 hours of content. It took me 31 to finish it, but a lot of that time was wasted trying to reproduce bugs or stubbornly attempting to sequence break. The game does little to really surprise you, but it’s also consistently above-average and will never disappoint you either. Overall, I would say that the title is definitely worth the time for any fan of the genre.

For a wider audience, though, maybe it’s a good idea to wait for that Steam Deck verification to play it on the go. Clockwork Ambrosia is a decent game by itself that shows promise for Realmsoft’s future if they decide to further invest in it. I would say that the most important lesson here is that even if you want to make a game from scratch, maybe it’s not necessary to start by inventing the universe, yeah?

Disclaimer: Clockwork Ambrosia was reviewed on PC (Steam Deck).