As required by law, after getting the you-win! endscene, Clutch dumps you back into the city. Its story is done, and has no further demands on me. Everything after that is just play. All doors are now open to me, as demonstrated literally above.
There’s a few more goals to chase down, both for in-game rewards and out of general principle. I can replay any of the story missions to get a higher rating if I didn’t come in first in the first place, and likewise proceed further in the side events. I can of course buy all the remaining upgrades, acquire the remaining cars, and fill out my garage’s collection.
After the jump, I take off my sunglasses… Continue reading →
This is the kind of thing that happens when you park for too long in the bowels of a particle collider. In this picture’s case, it was a zombie technician with a flamethrower-esque thing. They’ve got no range to speak of, so they’re really only a danger if my car has barely-holding-together levels of damage already, or if you just park there and taunt them. The zappy zombies are much less problematic than the occasional exploding zombies, which are–like so many things in my character’s life in Clutch–the fault of the Reapers. If you’re enlightened enough to be chosen, you take off your sunglasses to be zombified and get rigged up with explosives to wander the streets.
So there I am, on fire. It’s between missions, so respawning is just a button away. At this point, I’m in the third and final episode of the storyline. I’ve been deprogrammed by a scientist who is either unnamed or literally named Scientist, and I prefer to believe the latter. My diary indicates a hangover, to put it legally. It also says that “The Scientist says it’s the abstinence syndrome. The yen.” That figures. Leave it to a crazy cult to give you abstinence syndrome.
After the jump…science! Continue reading →
The Hunters are in Atom-city primarily for materialistic or hedonistic reasons. Money, adventure, excitement, really wild things — stuff like that. It’s only natural that, people being the kind of beings that people are, that some would seek out the spiritual side to running over hundreds of zombies and making other cars explode. Especially after lucre loses its luster, and they hit the rock bottom of seriously considering taking off their sunglasses for eventual suicide-by-car.
After the jump, the purpose-driving life Continue reading →
My diary informs me that I’ve come to Atom-city to face my fears and then return. It never goes into what those fears might be, but presumably they involve the natural fear anyone would have about staying in the company of a city of high-energy physics zombies. That kind of living situation presents various problems that you don’t have to deal with outside of it, so anyone would have some fears about whether or not they’re up to whatever they turn out to be. There is a certain amount of inference and interpretation in appreciating Clutch’s story.
Like any game, Clutch presents the player with a variety of problems and teaches them the tools and approaches to solve them through a combination of handholding and player exploration. One of the smaller problems and its solution is presented in the picture up above. Problem: there’s a zombie in front of your car. Solution: run over it. Problem: how do you get the maximum benefit out of hitting a zombie head-on? Solution: have the front guard grill option equipped on your vehicle, so that not only does the zombie get killed, it also gets sucked into the engine to be converted into turbo boost. You can see how this ties rather elegantly into further problems such as, how do I go faster to win this race?
After the jump, hunting problems and solutions Continue reading →
This is my first view of Atom-city from behind the wheel. In addition to showing me that is indeed how I’m supposed to write “Atom-city,” my opening diary entry informs me that on September 24th, 2006, there was a failure at the particle collider there. As everyone in the post-924 world (never forget!) knows, when your large hadronic collider has a “White Ring” anomaly that’s accompanied by “forceful energy blowouts”, everyone around it is either going to die, or turn into a zombie. Or, as my diary puts it, they will pass into a “somnambulic state,” which really doesn’t seem like the right term even if you are a Romero purist about what exact state of unpersonhood constitutes zombieness. It may be an accident of translation, but if so it’s a happy one–the frequently bizarre phrasing adds to the sense of disorientation from the start.
Keep reading after the jump to learn the solution to all problems. Continue reading →
