Do you ever meet somebody doing a really cool career and wonder: “What would I have to have done in order to be doing that every day instead of what I’m doing now?” I really love what I do every day (I’m a linguist), but this still happens to me a few times a week. I wish I was an oceanographer, or an experimental archaeologist, or an artisanal carpenter for only around 5 or 10 minutes.
The Children of Clay is a 5-10 minute long horror / archaeology game by messier on itch.io. I love this sort of thing, as it lets me indulge myself in this fantasy of doing a job for exactly how long that daydream lasts anyway.
When I was a kid (elementary school age) I really wanted to be an archaeologist. My teacher assigned us to find a person doing the job that we wanted when we grew up, and interview them. I diligently found an archaeologist at a local university, and after an hour of talking about what an archaeologist spends their time doing (apparently a lot of brushing dirt off of rocks hoping that they are actually potsherds), I no longer had any Indiana Jones aspirations.
messier has filled the Children of Clay with all of the accoutrements necessary to indulge yourself in the fantasy of being an archaeologist for a few minutes. They seem to have actually physically made the artifact you’re examining in the game and photographed it from every angle. The stop motion as the little Cthulhian idol turns back and forth is wonderfully creepy.
The particular variant of archaeology fantasy being expressed here is very specific – you’re the kind of occult investigator who who would work at Miskatonic University in a Lovecraft short story, who would inevitably end up dead or incurably insane. You spend your working hours dredging through piles of musty books and take joy at gazing with horror on pulpy bas-reliefs. You wear a tweed jacket and probably smoke a pipe, getting horrible smoky residue on all of the artifacts you are supposed to be conserving.
The game also has a research/note-taking system that lets you search your books and notes for keywords. I found a few sort of hidden things by looking up words related to the artifact, but I’m absolutely sure there’s more I didn’t get.
My favorite part is a short section where you have to identify and translate some runes written on the side of artifact. I might, however, be a little biased here, as any hint of my beloved linguistics in video games makes me happy.
Now go and play The Children of Clay, and harrumph with academic exasperation at what those foolish antiquarians have unearthed this time.
The Binary Ziggurat 