Visual Novel Review: Sweet Clockwork

Sweet Clockwork lets you play as Haena Ji, a student who seems to have it all: good grades, close friends and the attention of the most popular guys of the school. But when she gets to the classroom she was invited to at 6 PM because of a love letter she got, everything changes. She witnesses something truly awful that shouldn’t happen in a normal school. But before she can understand what’s happening, she gets knocked out and reappears in front of the school gates with three other classmates. This is how her first time-loop begins…

About Sweet Clockwork

Almost an otome game

The term is never used in the official description for Sweet Clockwork made by the developer, but you can still see the “otome” tag on Steam. The cover art for the game is also a bit deceiving, because you see one girl and three guys so you just assume at first glance that those are three love interests with each their own route. But the game actually has no such thing as a common route + three branches for each character. In fact, the whole purpose of the game is for the MC, Haena Ji, to get with I-on, the black-haired guy.

I usually don’t like stoic/kuudere love interests, but I-on was surprisingly my favorite character and he changed my perception of the trope. He may appear a bit cold on the outside, but he trusts MC with all his heart, is here to support her when she feels scared, and is willing to sacrifice everything to protect her. But I did feel a bit sad for Sol and Chabin because they weren’t given proper character development. They have a purpose in the story, but it was a bit sad to see them getting sidelined. They do have their own routes called “Normal Ending”, but they really are just Bad Endings…

A great presentation, and a lot of content to discover

Even though Sweet Clockwork is a small project, the game feels high-quality. The sprites of the characters are gorgeous (and they are a ton of them), and the background art look like it was self-made rather than taken from a free to use website. There’s also a lot of BGMs (although sometimes they don’t really match the mood of the story), chibi and pixel art. The translation is also good enough, but you can tell the game is originally Korean because of the sentence structure used. There are also times where the characters say “Hahahahahaha” repeatedly, which you can tell comes from “ㅋ” in Korean. This made some of the dialogues feel unnatural to read.

The soundtrack also contains one of the most unexpected songs you would think about for a visually cutesy game like this one, which is Bach’s Air on G String. I love when there are some orchestral songs in visual novel, like this one from Café Enchanté. So I especially liked this song too because it added such a solemn mood and melancholy to what was happening.

I was also pretty impressed by the amount of content we get for the price of the game. You can unlock side stories for each of the main trio and some of the side characters, which give you small snippets of their past and more insights. It’s nice because with the time-loop mechanic you don’t really get to have a proper introduction and understanding of them. There’s also a continuation of Ion’s route after you’ve unlocked the True Ending.

Some monotonous parts, but an intriguing story overall

I haven’t played a lot of indie visual novels yet, but from what I could tell some of them start off with a really interesting premise but fall short at the end, rather it is because of financial burdens or because the story is just too hard to wrap up easily. For Sweet Clockwork, I think they did a good job where the story feels finished and satisfying in the end. There are some pacing issues where the “slice-of-life” genre overtook the “mystery” of the story and leave you a bit dumbfounded because the MC is literally fighting for her life and it feels out of place to just talk about mundane stuff in this context. But overall, and especially since it deals with time-loops which can be hard to make sense of, the game progression was full of surprises and resolutions that you wouldn’t have expected.

I also appreciate that despite dealing with “heavy stuff” like multiple deaths and violence because of the time-loop mechanic, the game was never too dark or grim. There are no CGs were you see blood, or any sound effect where you hear screams or stuff like that. It’s not really a light-hearted game, but it’s also not a depressive game by any means. The MC is also surrounded by the sweet trio of men most of the time, so she’s never lonely to face challenges. This makes every event she’s facing less “depressing” for us the players.

Different gameplay mechanics

There are four distinct gameplay mechanics in Sweet Clockwork: choices (just like any other visual novels), deductions, exploration and battles. Deductions are kind of like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa, where you have to investigate a certain matter with the clues you have. Unlike those other games, you don’t get punished if you make a wrong choice since the game just lets you select another one if you’re incorrect. Exploration lets you roam around the school during certain segments of the game in a restricted area. Your character appears as a chibi model on the map as you move around. Sometimes, you’ll have to find clues on the map, but those are fairly easy.

Lastly, there is a battle system. Fighting rewards you with points that you can use to read the side stories of the characters, and depending on the difficulty of the fight, you’ll get more points. This was unexpected for me, as the only other games with fighting I know are gacha games like Love and Deepspace or Tears of Themis and The Silent Kingdom. At the start of the game, your best tactic is to just spam the magic spells. But later on, there’s a small level of strategy where you have to choose accordingly between attack and defense because the mobs have attacks that can deal a lot of damages. By the end, I felt a bit tired from the fighting because some bosses have a lot of HP and you can’t actually see their health bar.

I appreciate that the game tried to add diversity into the gameplay, although it takes a backseat throughout the story and could have been a bit more fleshed out.

Final thoughts

While Sweet Clockwork just released last month, it has a sort of nostalgic and old-school feeling which reminded me of Cheritz’s Nameless. Both are Korean titles that deal with supernatural stuff in a school setting. Another thing that they have in common is how the characters talk. I don’t know if it is because of the Korean translation, or if it is just a writer’s approach, but to me they are quite different than Otomate love interests for instance. So I would recommend this game to those who want to experience a visual novel that does things a bit differently than the most popular otome titles.

Although there is romance with I-on, Sweet Clockwork feels more like a visual novel targeted for a female audience who aren’t specifically looking for a romance build-up. So contrary to some tropes you might see in other otome games, like forced misunderstandings or miscommunications, here the story progresses nicely and steadily and there are no arguments with the male trio. So it’s also a game I would advise for those who like cute aesthetics and characters in general, but don’t want to play an otome game specifically.

Thank you for Team D.T.R for providing a free copy of the game!