June 16th, 2008 by PCG

Game Review: The Clumsys

If you've ever found yourself clicking on random basketballs, elephants or telephones and wondering why, you're not alone. Hidden object fans frequently find themselves in this situation, since certain games are better than others about including items that fitthe plot or time period that the game is meant to represent. The Clumsys is full of items that don't belong, but in this case it's on purpose.

Let me back up a bit. Albert is likely the coolest grandpa ever, for the simple fact that he keeps a time machine in an old barn on his property. When grandson Tim and his buddies come to the farm to celebrate Tim's birthday, the kids inevitably discover the time machine and accidentally get transported to different years in the past – one child to each era for a total of 20.

It falls to Helen (who is probably Tim's mother and Albert's daughter although the relationship isn't fully clear) to use the time machine to travel back and retrieve each child, fixing any inaccuracies that may have occurred along the way. Kids will be kids, after all, and the tykes couldn't seem to resist leaving modern items behind and causing bits of mischief here and there. Oh, and the kids have also broken all of Albert's cool gadgets, so Helen is also on the lookout for gadget pieces that can be reassembled into cool toys that will aid her search.

Instead of a list of items to find per location, players will have to rely on their eyes to identify any items that seem out of place in whatever era Helen has travelled to, like the life preserver in ancient Greece, or the speaker cabinet in Renaissance Italy's Sistine Chapel...

20 kids were at a birthday party, but - oh no! - they have found a time machine in the backyard and played a little bit with it... The inventor of the machine, the grandpa of the kid who's birthday it was, is now guiding your every step as you try to find and bring every one of those naughty kids back.

The place you start from and come back to every once in a while is a room where you have the time machine, time travel map, gadget assembly screen and photo album. The time travel map shows you the possible locations in time you can go to. As you choose one, the time machine gets you there.

The gadget assembly screen is where all the parts of the gadgets get as you collect them on the screens. You can come here when you have some of the parts to assemble the gadget according to the scheme. The gadgets that you get help you then find the kids.

Your main task is to find the kids and bring them back, so the photo album shows you how many kids you are to find and it gets filled as you find another kid...

Time machine, time travel, and 20 kids sneak on the time machine after Grandpa told them to leave the machine alone. The kids don’t listen and find themselves spread across different centuries messing with history. Poor Grandpa has to go to their locations, remove what’s the kids brought from our time, put things back in place, and find the kids. That’s the set up for The Clumsys Wonderful and original idea. Clumsy execution.

I love history and the story integrates a lot of history in a sensible way. However, I can’t say the same for the game experience. As soon as I arrive on the first scene in Troy, the graphics quality disappoints. However, let it slide and keep on playing in hopes things improve.

Because of the low quality graphics, the hidden objects (past and present) barely show up. While experience players complain that hidden object games get too easy, finding them in The Clumsys is too hard. In the mode where you must remove all modern toys and objects, the game says to find and remove objects that don’t belong. No list. We need a list because it’s not obvious which items belong and don’t belong in the scene...

The Clumsys from Iwin represent the bright and 100% family-friendly adventure featuring funny characters, funny graphics, and 20 stages of i-spy fun in all possible variations.

Speaking about the game story, you will be looking for 20 kids who got lost in time because they tried to decompile Grandpa Albert’s time machine. So, you’ll have to scour the the scenes of unspeakable historical value, like a shore of Troy with Trojan Horse on it, or the board of American spacecraft landing the Moon in 1962.

On each stage you’ll be looking for a child(you’ll have to find 20 kids in total). To find him you’ll have to scour four scenes representing different time eras...

There’s really something about the name of this game that actually summarizes the whole series of puzzles that you’ll be solving this time around. The Clumsys game, made by Banzai Interactive and Gogii Games, tells the unfortunate story of Albert and Helen Clumsy as they try to find all the kids in Tim Clumsy’s birthday party scattered all across time. You see, being the Grandpa of all Clumsys, Albert the scientist clumsily left his time machine for all the kids to play with. And being the Mother Clumsy, it is up to Helen to bring back all the kids and save time itself from possible chaos.

The Clumsys is actually a Hidden Object game, but unlike other games of this type that lists random items within a big mess, your role in this game is simply just to find inconsistencies within a certain time period and try to repair the sceneries so as to not disturb the whole passage of time. Afterwards, just find the hiding kid by using many of Albert’s gadgets and do the same for all 20 scenes (revealing 20 of the kids too).

With that said, you actually have 4 tasks to do to each scene in The Clumsys game. First, you have to find all the improper items obviously coming from the present time. These items are not listed, so you have to do actual brainwork to find them all. Second, you have to find and replace… umm… misplaced items, wherein you are given a silhouette of a misplaced item and try to place it back where it originally belongs. Third is to clean all of the vandalism the kids left behind, and the fourth and final task is to find the kid and bring him/her home to the farm...