This is a review for both "Clockwork Man" and "Clockwork Man: The Hidden World" since I played them back to back and they share the same lead character. Actually, I've played both these games many times on a different PC before I got into Steam. So my playtimes you see for each will probably be less than a normal playthrough since I can whiz through the games by now. We'll start with game #1:

Pros:
- Nice graphics and good character designs. The main girl, Miranda (YAY, she has my name!), is quite lovely.
- The voice acting is also good, for the most part. I really like who they chose for Miranda. Some of the others can be a bit cheesy but it is amusing rather than irritating.
- Interesting story.
- Both games have a very neat hidden object feature. Scrolling and zooming. Not every scene but many allow you to move around the area. Some items are sneakily hidden behind others but just one click to the left or right will reveal them.
- Both games also have an interesting hint system. You travel around with a little robot man and he'll help you locate those tough to find objects. He starts out with the ability to just tell you where a random something is. Then a little into the story, he learns how to give you an item's silhouette (which is the hint I prefer if I'm stuck). Further in the story, he gets other abilities. Like briefly highlighting each metal object on your HO list.
- In both games, the music isn't spectacular but it's pleasant to listen to. Actually, in #2 there are a couple places with very lovely melodies.
- When you beat each game, Freeplay opens up. This gives you random hidden object areas. Good for if you're in that "I have a craving to find stuff" mood.

Cons:
- Neither game is connected to Steam while you're playing. So you won't be able to chat with friends or take steam screenshots.
- Unfortunately, both games have issues when it comes to clicking on items. You'll find you need to be very precise and occasionally you'll need to click more than once or try clicking on a different part of the object. It doesn't happen TOO often or else I wouldn't be able to recommend these games.
- Both games are short. Boo.


Now I'll list the differences in Clockwork Man: The Hidden World:

- The length is longer. Because of the higher difficulty, possibly much longer.
- This game has a journal where Miranda records her adventures and anything of note. You WILL need to use this journal to solve quite a few puzzles.
- There are many more puzzles in #2 and some of them are downright devious. There are no skip options either. Also, it's easy to miss things that you need in some scenes so you might get stuck for awhile. I love this game but it IS a bit aggravating sometimes. Those who enjoy a challenge will have fun. :D
- The story has no tie-ins with the first game. The Hidden World's plot is much more involved than #1 and, in my opinion, fascinating.
- The voice acting, again in my opinion, is better than the first game. (Miranda is still the same, which is good!)
- Maybe it's my imagination but it seems the graphics are better in #2, though I'm pretty sure they used the same game engine.
- When you finish the game, you can rewatch any of the cutscenes.


So in closing, I really enjoy both these games so I'm definitely recommending them to hidden object and puzzle fans. But, because of their short length, you should wait and grab them when they're on sale.


Important Note! The games might not load up for you, which is an issue I had. Right click on the Clockwork Man title, click on Properties, click on Local Files, click on Browse Local Files (which will bring up your program files for the games), right click on the Clockwork Man title again, click on Troubleshoot Compatibility, and finally click on Try recommended settings. I did that for each game and then they worked just fine.

What a lovely game!

A prematurely silver 21-year-old engineer named Miranada repeatedly and politely puts down any sexism against her from the male characters with her competence and confidence.

There's an adorable robot.

There's an adorable squirrel. The interactions with the squirrel made me nostalgic for the Ken and Roberta Williams days of the old Sierra King's Quest games. Very clever; great attention to detail.

The art is beautiful.

The puzzles are interesting and engaging.

For a Hidden Object Game, the plot is absolutely spectacular and the characters are rich and entertaining.

Great casual, low stress game for next time you're stuck in bed sick for the day.

The Hidden World continues the story of Miranda Calomy and her clockwork-friend, Sprocket. Like its predecessor, the basic goal is to search a series of beautifully drawn scenes to find a bunch of hidden objects. However, the sequel increases the scope of the original, both in length and gameplay. Where the first game lasted maybe 2-3 hours, this one seemed a bit longer (maybe around 3-4 hours, depending on how slowly you take things). The interface and quality of the puzzles have also improved as well. This time, the puzzles are much more involved, and actually require some real thought at times! Amazing, I know. It's a nice improvement. However, with that change, one positive trait of the first game is now lost - the sequel is no longer kid friendly. Thinking back on it, there are probably a couple of puzzles in here that younger kids wouldn't be able to solve on their own (one involving classic works of literature springs to mind), and most of the puzzles are at least a bit more difficult overall. So, while the hidden-object scenes are still great for kids, they might need help with some of the puzzles that connect them. If you enjoy hidden-object games and are looking to fill a few hours with (mostly) mindless, casual fun, you'll probably like this. Again, my only issue against recommending this fully (assuming you like the genre), would be the price. I feel like it's on the higher end for what you get, even considering the potentially "endless" replay of randomized scenes. So, just take that into consideration when considering a purchase, or maybe wait for a sale. Otherwise, as with the first game, if you don't care for mindless hidden-picture games or puzzles, move along, there's nothing to see here.

The first Clockwork Man game was not so good; while it was well presented, the gameplay itself was quite frustrating or unfair at times. This sequel is improved in gameplay and presentation.
What I liked

• A mix of HOG and point-and-click problem solving.
  
• I mentioned high production value: excellent art, music and voice acting throughout.
  
• A simple but interesting story.
  
• Some scenes let you scroll or zoom for more searching, which is fun. Takes some getting used to.
  
• Dialog between characters is fun enough that you won't just click through it. This is helped by the excellent voice acting.
  
• Throughout the game, the main character keeps a journal that serves as summary of the story and a reminder of what needs doing next. It's well written and beautifully illustrated.
  
• As in the first game, there's an elaborate hint system where you can choose how exactly you want to be helped: a preview of what objects look like, a radar that highlights items, a straight-up locator, and a narrative hint guide.

What I didn't like

• Probably the worst offence of this series is how objects might be partially obstructed behind other items in the scene, sometimes in a way that hides their defining features.
  
• Although this problem is not as prevalent here as in the first game, you still occasionally need to find objects that end up looking nothing like what you expected. A shovel or a saw will end up looking like very strange variations of each. Not what you imagine in your mind at all. A hint system allows you to see a preview of the object, but why should have to use that? But, this rarely happens, unlike in the first game where it was just terrible.
  
• Also improved from the first game but still present: some tiny, tiny objects and fiddly clicking.
  
• The point-and-click sections necessitate pixel hunting and mouse sweeping, unless you're willing to use hints. Later in the game, a hint allows you to see all interactive items for a short time.
  
• Related to the above points, I again get the feeling that they really want you to make use of the hint system as part of your experience. That's because the hint system is well developed and kind of fun to use, they probably wanted to capitalise on it.

All in all I enjoyed this game much more than the first one (which got a negative review). Embrace the fact that the hints are part of the gameplay, and enjoy this nice casual game.
Some technical notes:

• Not widescreen, no high resolution
  
• No Steam integration (overlay or screenshots or achievements / cards)
  
• Can't Alt-Tab away from the game (if you're in fullscreen); the screen will flash a bit and then put you back inside.
  
• Game wouldn't run on my PC, I played it on another PC (runs fine in Windows 8) and the developers were nice enough to try and help in the forum.

This is the second in the series and if you liked that one then you'll like this one as it's just more of the same. Hidden object scenes with puzzles and adventure elements galore. Very pretty graphics, engaging storyline if just a tad predictable. Worth a look for HO fans.

This game is a big step up from the original Clockwork Man, but doesn't quite go far enough. It's more involved with the story and puzzle-solving, almost like a direct rip-off of the Samantha Swift series in that regard, but towards the end, you solve a series of rather challenging puzzles, then it just ends abruptly. The visuals are better this time around with limited animation in some scenes and more varied settings. If you're a huge fan of hidden object games and can get this really cheap in a sale, it's a "maybe", but I don't strongly recommend it. You're better off with Midnight Mysteries, Alex Hunter, and Samantha Swift.

While the adventuring aspect of the story is okay, I wasn't very fond of its morality. I think it's weird that a child-friendly hidden object game is making statements about how it's wrong to want to live longer and death is great. The first Clockwork Man's story did the same thing. I would've like to have seen more focus on its Steampunk elements than all the philosophizing about the human lifespan.

It's always annoying when technical issues get in the way of enjoyment of a game. I'm doing this to compliment or complain about design decisions, not coding errors. Where's the fun in pointing out that someone forgot to add a colon somewhere in the thousands of lines of text that make up the framework of a game? Still, sometimes games are so badly compromised that it must be mentioned. Clockwork Man: The Hidden World is one such game. It tells the story of Miranda, a young scientist bent of uncovering the secret behind her parents' disappearance nearly a decade earlier. She'll travel to Thule with the help of her clockwork robot sidekick - a small golden droid who speaks entirely in bleeps and bloops, turning him into a sort of combination C-3P0 and R2D2.

Sadly, this journey is hampered by both design errors and technical gaffs, which I'll detail as we move through the... Hidden Object Criteria!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

Oh, it's bad. Extremely bad. While the game tries to keep the items true to the steampunk Victorian setting, there is no excuse for how absolutely covered in garbage the game's screens are. One particularly dire example gives a quaint Irish cottage the character of a trash yard, with empty pots, furniture, and bits of food scattered over every concievable surface. Then there are rampant cases of size-cheating - in one case I was asked to look for a pocket knife which was hidden in the spokes of a wagon wheel, making it something along the lines of eighteen inches big. This is all made worse by the developers' decision to include 'scrolling' hidden object screens, in which the player is forced to scroll the screen up/down or left/right to find all the items. I'm baffled by this choice, since it takes the baseline concept of hidden object games - put 20 items on a screen and have the player look for them - and increases the amount of trash-covered space they have to look through by threefold. Absurdly, this massively increased difficulty is accompanied by one of the slowest-to-recharge hint buttons I've ever encountered. Also, during once stretch of playing the game the hint button glitched out on me and flat-out refused to recharge, stranding me alone with some of the most annoying difficult hidden object scenes ever.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

Absolutely not. This is classic 'find a load of nonsense, get one useful item' design. Occasionally the game offers some meagre justification, such as 'clean up all the bottles in this yard' or 'help me find all the food I've squirrelled away', but by and large there's no rationalization given for any of Miranda's searches.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

It's a compelling enough narrative - villains are on their way to Thule, where Miranda's parents were last seen, and she's got to go along to stop said conspirators from ruining that paradise undisturbed by history. The journey isn't structured particularly well, opening with Miranda exploring a mine, then flashing back to an extended sequence of searching through offices and attics a few weeks earlier. The developers are trying to use the cinematic device of starting with the action and then zipping back to tell the story, but the mine exploration isn't notably more thrilling than searching for old documents and artifacts hidden in a house - this is a hidden object adventure, after all, and the 'thrilling' scale is only ever going to get so high. While the hidden object puzzles don't usually make the most sense, at least the puzzles hit in nicely with the setting. Repairing a submarine and unlocking alien technology seem like the kind of things that could be solved with clever puzzle design, and they are - but the lack of a skip button could prove terribly frustrating to players looking to just enjoy a pleasant story and some object hunting.

Clockwork Man: The Hidden World has too many missteps to easily recommend. The HOSs are needlessly complicated - beyond their sheer size, they also feature parallax scrolling, meaning that different planes of the background move at different speeds, covering items at different times. Good luck finding a snake when it's only visible for a few degrees halfway to the right edge of the level! Glitches in the hint system mean that sections of the game drag on far longer than they're welcome, and sometimes the music gets stuck, and continues playing a single set of atmospheric effects in every screen. It's a mess, and the story just isn't good enough to be worth slogging through to experience all of it.

It's better than the first game, but that's not saying much. The first one was absolutely terrible, while this one is merely awful.

The hidden object scenes very inconsistent in difficulty. Most of the objects are glaringly obvious but there's often one or two that are tiny and blend with the background, making them almost impossible to see. This is only made worse by the low resolution. The difficulty progression is also way off; many of the early scenes are far more difficult than ones later in the game. The items in the scenes are quite boring and the player is often required to find multiples of the same object. Some objects are mislabelled, quite badly so in some cases.

The puzzles are for the most part pathetically easy, although, again, some are much harder. And again, this seems to have nothing to do with progression through the game; some are just randomly hard for no apparent reason. Some puzzles lack context, meaning that the only way to solve them is to randomly try things until something works or just wait for the hint bar to charge.

The story is fairly bad, although well acted, and the ending is just rubbish. Perhaps the most annoying thing about it is that it has nothing to do with the story of the first game and in no way addresses the cliffhanger ending from the first. I thought that perhaps it would tie in later on, but nope, it's like the devs just forgot the first game exists. Which in all honesty I can't blame them for since the first game is so atrocious.

Apart from the gameplay itself there are numerous other problems with this game. There are instances where puzzle elements appear almost completely off screen; and by almost completely I mean that only a single pixel is visible. Some objects in the hidden object scenes are behind parts of the interface and so are not visible at all. The click detection is frequently so picky that it refuses to acknowledge that the player has clicked on an object unless the exact couple of pixels that it is happy with are clicked, leading to a great deal of wasted time looking for objects I had already found and clicked on a few times. Also the sound is somewhat bugged. I found numerous instances where lines of dialogue did not play, and at one point the ambient sound in one scene got stuck in a loop and continued to play in every other scene after that.

Having played many HOGs I feel I have a good basis for comparison and I would have to say that this one is not worth it. Not even if it were free. There are many other HOGs that are far better and much more deserving of your time.

No matter what you try, this game won't work on Windows 10 64bit.

If you have Windows 10.....dont touch it! It wont work. Devs have abandoned it.