Clockfall is a unique game. Unlike most roguelites, it doesn’t kill you with a massive boss or a swarm of enemies. No-no. Rever Games’ title kills you by letting the timer run out. We were able to check out this fun and engaging dungeon-crawler hybrid over the weekend, and we have to say, it’s hella fun trying to save a burning village while constantly checking the timer. It gave us moments of sheer panic, but we loved every single second of it!
Buying Seconds with Blood
Clockfall is a game that lets you explore dungeons—but only for a short while. As the clock ticks away minutes and then seconds, you frantically run around, killing everything that comes your way, trying to find or solve things as fast as humanly possible.
Time is Not on Your Side
The combat is fast and satisfying, letting you use all kinds of melee weapons as well as magic, dodging and rolling away from hits while chaining spells together. It’s a weird concept that, at first, feels unrewarding. You think that the devs are handling your progression by actively punishing your curiosity.
Exploring takes time. The doors between rooms literally cost time to open. A starting door might knock five seconds off your clock, and later ones ask for a lot more. You are constantly forced to make choices on the fly. Most of them are quite awful choices because you’re insanely rushed for time, and knowing that every second matters really messes with your head. It’s hard to think about how to spend your gold, and whether it should go toward a temporary stat boost or sacrificing your current progress to literally buy more time on the clock. It makes every single decision feel desperate.
It was never possible for us to slowly clear out a room and check every corner for loot. Trying to meticulously break every crate means dying. Running past enemies and leaving chests behind is a must in Clockfall. It completely goes against typical RPG hoarding instincts, and it genuinely drove us crazy at times. Please don’t think we’re complaining—far from it. The devs came up with a very unique and fun concept, and we simply couldn’t get enough of it!
The Village Defense Phase
All the resources we managed to gather in the dungeon were used to fortify a settlement and defend it against massive waves of enemies. It’s like playing a completely different game where you need to raise lethal defenses and traps, and then hold the horde back.
Remember what we said about the developers actively making things difficult for you? Well, this phase is no exception. Here too, we actively lost. No matter what we did, we just couldn’t get a break. Sooner or later, a moment will come when you simply can’t hold out anymore and your traps will get overrun. When you inevitably die, the village burns down. It is a miserable and exhausting grind. And yet, while at work, we thought more and more about getting back to it, knowing full well that all the cards are held by the house. Again, it’s an insane concept, and we loved how we jumped from being a high-speed dungeon speedrunner to a desperate defender.
There is one good thing, however. The permanent currencies that we collected could later be spent to permanently upgrade our base damage or unlock new spells for the next run.
Should you play it?
From everything that we’ve seen so far, there is a great, but stressful loop in Clockfall. Mixing a speedrun dungeon crawler with a hopeless wave defense mode is a genuinely cool idea that we enjoyed immensely. We can’t wait to see how the devs shape the game in the future.
ID Card
- Developer: Rever Games
- Publisher: Radical Theory
- Platforms: PC (Steam Early Access)
- Release Date: May 28, 2026
- Genre: Action RPG / Roguelite
Leave a comment