Claybook first caught my eye with some screenshots of a dead-eyed child staring enigmatically at a table full of clay objects. So many games look identical these days that something like that really cuts through the noise and demands your attention, but it also wasn’t immediately clear what kind of game Claybook was. The release date came and went, and my interest faded—post-release games are rarely worth it since search traffic quickly tapers off for all but each year’s biggest releases. Some time later, I noticed Claybook again, this time releasing onto the Nintendo Switch, and was once more intrigued by the mystery of what it has to offer. Having now played it and unlocked 58 of its 60 stars (because the final level is simply too infuriating to obsess over the missing 2), I’m not entirely sure it knows what kind of game it is, either; Claybook is a racing game, a physics platformer, and a resource management game at different points, existing as a kind of playground for numerous different experiences of wildly varying quality, but all of this evens out into a “jack of all trades, master of none” type of game that’s surprisingly easy to walk away from.

Claybook at its best is fast-paced and challenging, but not frustrating

The racing levels toward the beginning and middle of Claybook are easily the best experiences it has to offer. These consist of you being handed control of a sphere and asked to touch certain points on a course, which ends up feeling like a single lap on a physics-based racecourse, and finding ways to incorporate Claybook‘s unique rewind mechanic that both leaves a copy of your shape behind (which can be used to block or direct liquid) and provides a handy way of rewinding back onto platforms is a joy. Most levels like this are quickly finished and allow for a lot of creativity.

Such levels also justify the rankings that pop up when you finish them. Since time ticks upward in these racing levels, you’re encouraged to do a little better by utilizing Claybook‘s mechanics in unusual ways to optimize your approach, and all without the game making you feel like you’re on a timer.

Whenever you obtain 3 stars on a level, your time (or score) is saved onto a leaderboard where you can compare how well you did against the efforts of others. Using the leaderboard to incentivize better play rather than counting down and automatically ending the level is a great way of avoiding restrictive penalties while still pushing players to improve, and I adore this unconventional approach to game difficulty.

That just about sums up the levels that I liked, actually; all of the good ones focus heavily on being fast, short, and easy enough to obtain 3 stars on that their difficulty arises primarily from the competition of strangers on the leaderboard.

Claybook at its worst is slow, tedious, and unreasonably awkward to control

I ended up not caring about my standing on most levels’ leaderboards because the road to 3 stars is often laborious to a fault. For example, later racing levels count down instead of up, with your score determined by how many awkwardly-placed waypoints you can reach before it hits zero. Since these levels go on and on, waypoints are placed all over the level rather than being a simple zip across the track, and revisiting the same area 2 or more times becomes a serious problem because of the impact your movement has on it. Outside of the shapes you play as and can switch to, absolutely everything is destructible—platforms, ladders, and even the ground under you deforms and wears away as you travel across it, which means that a thin platform might be filled with holes by the time you have to revisit it. The only way to fill these in is to rewind and fill it with clay, but your shapes are typically limited to a sphere, a box, a cylinder, and a disk that are all equally unsuitable for subtle patch jobs.

Filling in holes unevenly creates problems of its own because of Claybook‘s clunky physics. It’s not uncommon to create a bump that sends you flying off in the wrong direction, though a more common outcome if you’re moving slowly is standing around while you watch your clay shape awkwardly bounce off of it, hoping that it’ll catch the top edge and climb over before you’ve created another problematic hole to deal with.

Levels can quickly get away from you like that, which is where the value of short, easily repeatable chunks of gameplay comes from. Sadly, later levels don’t recognize this, instead providing you with a long list of tasks that have to all be completed if you want to finish them 100% (which is required for obtaining 3 stars). Rather than being free to spend a minute or two figuring out an optimal route through a level, you’re stuck backtracking and creating a mess of the clay environment while routing liquid into tanks, creating copies of shapes to fill in specific areas with clay, and leaving objects behind while trying to figure out a way to have an object or two nearby to switch into. These levels can take upwards of 15 minutes to figure out, and having to restart because you made an unsalvageable mess after all of that work is deflating, as is accidentally pressing the minus button which instantly restarts the level without so much as a single prompt. On a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, that minus button is easy to confuse with the nearby screenshot button in the heat of the moment, which is a wonderful mistake to make right at the end of a lengthy level.

User-made content is nice and all, but I don’t see it being much of a crutch

Games with user-made content are rare, though they’re always nice to see, and Claybook has a creation mode that allows you to piece together a level with the same goal as one of the pre-made ones. The tools are a little on the clunky side, but it’s easy to see how one could carefully design an enjoyable level given enough time and experience. The problem is that the user-made content right now is a bit thin (5 pages, only 1 of which has received any meaningful feedback in the form of thumb-ups and thumb-downs) despite levels being cross-platform by default, and the levels with the highest user rating are more similar to Claybook‘s bad levels than its good ones. That just leaves you creating levels that you enjoy and playing through them by yourself, which might be a draw for some people, but that’s the point where I’d rather move on to another game entirely.

Colorful visuals and a bad camera paired with a forgettable soundtrack

Visually, there’s nothing particularly wrong with Claybook; it’s colorful enough that you can easily keep track of different colors of liquid, and the numerous colors of clay wear off on your controlled shape in interesting ways as you dig into it. The game’s lower resolution can be a bit of a drag at times (the tradeoff for a decent framerate in the 30s is a lot of jaggies), but what really got under my skin was the camera’s frequent missteps. It’s not uncommon for the camera to totally lose the plot whenever you dig underground or find yourself inside of a clay structure and start oscillating wildly between totally different camera angles. Sometimes it clips through the ground and gives you a look at the bottom half of the dead-eyed kid’s chair, while other times you get a bunch of black and green screens that unexpectedly punch you in the face. Naturally, this kind of thing complicates later levels and contributes to how easy it is to settle for 1 or 2 stars (or simply skip a level entirely, which you can do since later packs of levels are unlocked based on your star total). Then there’s the soundtrack, which is major-key heavy and produced well enough, but so entirely forgettable that I had to open up the game again to check what it’s like despite spending over 5 hours with Claybook.

Story: N/A Gameplay: 3/6 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Claybook Review Screenshots (Nintendo Switch)

*A Nintendo Switch key was provided for the purpose of this Claybook review. You can’t use the Switch’s built-in video recorder with Claybook, defeating the point of a mobile console.

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