What is Clockwork Revolution?

 Ain't I played this already?

Picture this, you're sitting down hoping to enjoy some brand spanking new games coming from the Xbox games showcase, really just nervously killing time whilst hoping the brief little Starfield trailer mid-way through the showcase wasn't that blow-out showcase the team promised. (Thank god for that forty minute presentation, I was getting scared.) So I'm sitting on my hands when lo-and-behold: Bioshock Infinite pops up on the screen and I'm thinking "Hang on, I've played this game." Haven't we all? Bioshock Infinite, the masterpiece finale to the Bioshock saga taking place in a Steampunk Americana-addled sky city? Well, I guess this one isn't in the sky but apart from that- one-to-one! And this one is made by Inexile? And it's called Clockwork Revolution? Heck, this demands some investigating!

Still I sit and wait for the return of some of my most beloved gaming characters and worlds in a franchise I know will never return quite how I want it to, but whilst Ken Levine is off doing his thing and the Bioshock franchise is off suffering the creative talents of another, we have the fellows at Inexile to bring us our alternative history with a potentially sardonic look at near-extremist philosophies. and with their back-catalogue this both feels like exactly the kind of game within their wheelhouse and also nothing like what I ever would have expected from their doors. I do not wish to make myself sound apprehensive, though; I am beyond happy with what I'm seeing the team put together and when I talk about liking to see development studios grow to tackle new types of games- this is what I mean. Not the 'Mobile Rabbit Hole' we see so many trip into.

Inexile are the fellows behind the return of the Wasteland franchise of RPG games that many thought had died under the boot of Fallout. When Black Isle Studios came together to solidify the idea of Wasteland into the legendarily iconic first Fallout games, the 'Wasteland' of the past became a relic of where the ideas of Fallout started. Devoid of many of the alternate history 50's Americana stylistic choices of Fallout, Wasteland presents a more desolate Sci-fi vision of a world swept with the sands of destruction and besieged by robots both scraped up from the past and cobbled together in the styles of the blown-up present. Inexile came to the Wasteland franchise long after it had disintergrated into a footnote of Fallout's story with a spark of an idea for how the tactical gameplay could be rocketed into the modern day. 

Wasteland 2 was something of a shock when it landed, languishing within the plains of the Kickstarter Wild West back when all those projects were doomed to go nowhere. (Actually, I guess that's the reputation Kickstarter has always had and still does to this day.) Maybe if I'd actually done my research back then and seen that Brian Fargo, executive producer and one of the key creators behind 'Fallout', was the founder of the company I might have taken it a bit more seriously. As it was I ended up stumbling upon Wasteland 2 when it launched fully to consoles and was treated to a more open ended X-Com like game with the RPG tropiness that I love, adventurous scale that I crave and a size that was more than I could handle considering I've never finished the game even to this day. (One day I'll get around to it, I swear!) 

Clockwork Revolution is a vast jump from the top-down tactical angle of those games into the First Person methodical shooter genre that Bioshock really defined back when it first launched. It centres itself around the concept of Time travel with hints of the kind of technological quirks one would hope to exploit with such a premise; such as the destruction of buildings to their particulate and then their temporal reconstruction using 'don't worry about it' tech magic. I love the promise of that sort of stuff, destruction technology is horrifically underserved in the industry and even the hint that Clockwork Revolution provided us was like balm upon my sore heart. I'm not expecting Crackdown 3 reveal trailer levels of deconstruction, but anything that makes me go wow would be nice!

But don't go around believing that just because the team have moved towards a more typically direct style of game they would have somehow lost the inner spark to be creative with consequence mechanics! Afterall, what is time travel without the 'Back to the Future' clause of whatever you do in the past severely effecting the make-up of the future? Materialistic gilded walkways reverting into militaristic dictatorships- pivot moments in history twisted to some unknown gain. It's impossible to know right now how much Inexlie will play with this sort of stuff but we know they'll be touching on it from a story perspective at least- they want to really milk this concept for all it's worth and when you go 'Time Travel' it really is an "all or nothing" formula- I'm glad they're going with "all".  

In it all I just hope, even if it's in an understandably less extreme degree, we get some agency in player choices- particularly with this idea of shifting future realities in the mix! Fargo's Wasteland 2 gave us sides to pick in small scale conflicts and Wasteland 3 (apparently) builds the breadth of it's core narrative around picking between a three sided power struggle. Clockwork Revolution isn't a natural evolution upon the studios' past works, but we should always take the best of our past and bring it to where we go next. Some out there consider Wasteland 3 one of the greatest RPGs of all time for the way it handled reactionary content and replayabiltiy, wouldn't it be a crime for Inexile's next game to not inherit even a hint of that majesty?

I find it inescapable to end up comparing Clockwork Revolution with the stylings of Bioshock Infinite in it's genre, style, visual characterisation and perhaps even in it's approach to wider thematics if I'm interpreting some of the visual lore hints correctly. But note well that Bioshock Infinite is one of my favourite games of all time and that itch I've had for a follow-up has haunted me since it left my system- this is like reintroducing crack to an addict who was forced to go cold-turkey ten years ago- morbidly exciting and potentially fatal. If I have a heart attack getting worked up about Clockwork Revolution then I'd consider that a great way to go. As it happens with what we've been just teased about so far, I'm more interested in the idea of Clockwork Revolution than what we've currently seen- but when the past is taken into account I can hardly just not believe Inexile when they promise they've got another something special on their hands. Oh, I am here for the fireworks- even if they don't have so much as a respective release quarter yet...