Create Intricate Contraptions From Your Own Clones in ‘The Last Clockwinder,’ Out Today

We’ve all been there: Too much work to do, and too little of you to go around. But that won’t be a problem in The Last Clockwinder, which brings its time-looping, clone-creating puzzles to Meta Quest 2 and Steam today. Check out the launch trailer below:

Pontoco co-founder, game designer, and engineer John Austin described The Last Clockwinder like “a loop pedal for your whole body,” which should resonate with any musicians out there. Solve each puzzle in The Last Clockwinder by cloning yourself in two, four, or eight-second intervals and creating intricate chains of cause-and-effect. Try to be as efficient as possible, or get stylish and toss fruit behind your back and into the waiting bucket. Each new puzzle will help you uncover the secrets of this mysterious clockwork tree—and why it’s steadily sinking into the ocean.

Our conversation with Austin spanned from F1 pit crews to “How It’s Made” videos—and of course the requisite nod to longtime loop-puzzle developer Zachtronics. And did you know that Quest treats each new clone in The Last Clockwinder like a player with a pair of Touch controllers? All that and more in our interview below.

John Austin: Great question. You hit a button to start a recording, perform an action, and then a clone will appear, doing that action on a loop.

Maybe that first clone grabs a fruit and tosses it across the room. As a next step, you might walk to the other end of the room and record a clone catching the fruit. And then another that sticks the fruit into a harvesting bucket. In this way you can create these long chains of clones passing off objects and solving challenges.

Each of the recordings you make can be either 2, 4, or 8 seconds long. This might seem like an arbitrary limitation but is actually a cornerstone of the game’s design! Short clone lengths force you to work with yourself to accomplish complex tasks, rather than trying to do everything with a single clone. And the limitation makes iteration quick: if you want to try a different approach, it’s just a couple of seconds to re-make your recordings.

It’s all very musical, much like a loop pedal but for your whole body. We tried hard to make the action of recording seamless. You do the actions, and it all just works and lines up.

JA: One fun inspiration is the perfect synchronization of F1 pit crews. It’s such a perfect feeling when all your clones line up together, working as a well-oiled machine. And of course, we’ve watched countless hours of “perfect loop” gifs and “How It’s Made” videos of real-life factories. We eventually came to describe the summation of these inspirations as “Contraption Satisfaction,” which became a north star for the game’s design.

On the games-side, a big one for us has been Zachtronics games like SpaceChem and Opus Magnum. One of the things I admire about these games is how they offer creative challenges rather than puzzles. Every Zachtronics puzzle offers many different solutions, depending on how you prefer to play the game.

One thing we’ve distinctly avoided from this genre, though, is the programming aspect. Automation games are notorious for having a somewhat laborious process of writing out instructions for your machines to execute. Sometimes playing them can feel like real work!

Using the cloning mechanic, we realized early on that we could skip the entire concept of programming. You don’t have to tell the clones what to do. Your actions are the instructions!

JA: I’m always impressed by those folks that can score the ‘hole-in-one’ types of contraptions. One of the mechanics of the game is that if you manage to do something once, the clone will repeat it perfectly, every time. So it’s tricky, but you can set up machines that make these perfect shots from all the way across the room!

I don’t have quite that much patience, haha. I tend to play more sloppily, and with very short clones (2 seconds). The short clones are challenging because you only have a second or two to get the action complete, but it means the final machine can be very efficient!

JA: It is! There is an upper limit, but it’s quite high (around 25). That’s enough that most players don’t even bump into it on a normal playthrough.

We spent a lot of effort early on implementing a very efficient input system for our clones. Unity recently released a new Input System package, and we’ve made a fair number of modifications to it. Under the hood, our clones are treated just like real players. In fact, with 25 clones, the game thinks that there are 50 unique Oculus Quest Controllers connected at the same time, operating like any other device in the system. That might sound expensive, but it’s really quite fast. On most frames, handling input is just a matter of updating a few pointers to the new recorded frame for each device.

Rendering was the trickier challenge. We felt strongly about releasing a game that had quality visuals, even when running on a mobile platform like Quest.

Our environment is specifically created for these constraints. We designed the lighting to only cast direct light onto walls and ceilings, lighting the remainder of the room with bounced, diffuse light. Because gameplay objects aren’t in direct light, we generally don’t need real-time shadows. We then were able to spend that performance boost on other areas like adding full HDR post-processing and lightmapped specular highlights.

JA: Yes, there is! Early on, we knew we wanted to create something that was more than just ‘one puzzle after another’, so we brought on George Lockett and Olivia Wood to write the story. They’re an incredible writing duo and absolutely knocked it out of the park.

You play as Jules, a girl who is trying to save her childhood home, a massive clockwork tree at the edge of the galaxy, from sinking into the ocean. As you play, you dig up old recordings from Edea, the caretaker of this place, who has gone missing, and piece together what happened before the tree is lost for good.

The script is voice acted by an incredible cast. The lead roles are played by big names from Firewatch, Final Fantasy, and Fire Emblem. They’ve really given it their all, and it’s a joy to listen to! I’m really excited for everyone to experience it themselves.

JA: This was a fun partnership to stumble into! We actually came into this quite late in the process. As we were wrapping up the game’s development, we wanted to find a partner that could help us stick the landing. Cyan Worlds has over 20 years of experience releasing games, so when the opportunity arose, we just had to work with them. And of course, we’re all big fans of the Myst series.

They’ve been fantastic to work with. They’ve helped us land the marketing and release in a way that we just wouldn’t have been able to on our own. Unlike more traditional publishers that might take more control (and can sometimes make the release more challenging, not easier), Cyan has been very flexible. This is, personally, my ideal kind of publisher: they help us where we need it, and then step back and let us just focus on making a good game.

JA: None that I can say, just yet! We are, of course, going to continue making games. But what form that takes is hard to say. We make games for the joy of making them, and that’s led us to The Last Clockwinder. Who can say where it’ll lead next?

JA: All I can say is that we’re just getting started. I hope you join us for the ride!

Time is ticking, so head over to the Meta Quest Store (or Steam) and pick up The Last Clockwinder for $24.99 USD!