Welcome to our review of Claybook on PlayStation 4, a game all about clay and physics.
Claybook is a unique world made entirely of clay. Every inch of the environment can be shaped and molded. Everything has matter inside it, not just an outer shell. Clay can be liquid or solid, and it can be deformed and destroyed.
In the game, you step into the shoes of brave kids who bring the Claybook to life. Each chapter of the book challenges you with unique obstacles and puzzles. You possess clay blobs and morph them into different shapes to overcome tricky situations. Each shape has its strengths and weaknesses, and some even have special powers.
Claybook is a fun and colorful games with really bad camera handling. More on that later on the interview, because it needs to be said first that this is more directed to children than adults.
The entire game is made up in small chapters and bigger books. It is your job to properly finish all the required objects. Leaderboards are put in place for those wanting to speedrun, though I should more say this game does not really ask for speed, often it is more a matter of being able to reach the place you want.
As with real clay, it is susceptible to real-life physics and this is the big part of this game that truly rocks. Fall down from a height, it “dents” your clay in the same time real life would. This is an added difficulty as it could seriously prevent you from properly clearing an obstacle.
At times you need to destroy things, at other times “eat” things like chocolates, … all add to the variety of the game. Another fun aspect is picking up the colors of other clay, just like the real deal. Clearly, a lot of time went into the design and general idea behind the game.
Sadly the great idea and gameplay suffer from a horrible way to handle the camera. It imposes a certain angle and while you can slightly adjust it, it never really does it right for me. I would love a more distant top view for a game like this. But often enough, I ended up zooming in on the clay and lost all focus on wherever I was in the game.
If they had handled these in a better way, this could be a great game for kids, it really would be. There is even a creator mode that allows you to just keep making more and more worlds and levels. There really are many reasons to buy this game for your kids.
Also supported in Claybook, cross-platform sharing of those self-created levels. Across all of them. So it won’t matter if they play on different platforms, they are all supported inside the game.
In conclusion, Claybook might be hurt by the camera angles, it sure is not hurt by the gameplay and mechanics it brings to the table. While this is not an AAA game or even a genre that most people will play, I do think this game is quite fun! I also think this is what it is all about, a children’s game should be fun and it succeeded in exactly that!
