Clockwords is a typing game series in Adobe Flash by Gabob. Clockwords: Prelude was released in 2009, which introduced most of the gameplay elements, while Clockwords: Act 1 was released in 2010. The game has you play as a genius inventor who uses a machine to fight spiders which are trying to steal his documents and give them to his nemesis. This is accomplished by typing in words. The more letters in the chambers are used to construct the word, the more damage it does. If all letters are used, another chamber from the boiler is opened. It's unlikely that Clockwords: Act 2 or any future installments are going to ever come out due to the lack of news regarding the series, its creators, and the death of Adobe Flash.
This game provides examples of:
- Asymmetric Multiplayer: The game suggests that the other player who joins should move the mouse around. The first player would type in words, though the other player can brainstorm new ones.
- Boring, but Practical: More commonly used letters like A, E, I, L, O, and S don't deal much damage, but the fact that they're used in so many words makes them a reliable source of it.
- Damage Over Time: Thermite letters set enemies on fire, doing 20 damage over 4 seconds, with the description of them even mentioning the trope name.
- Elite Mook: The big spiders, which have a lot more health than normal ones.
- Forced Tutorial: The first level has an unskippable tutorial on what game objects are and how to type in words.
- Freemium: Act 1 is playable for free, but the game has premium features that let you play all four stages, use a word catalog that catalogs all words you've used and gives a bonus for new ones, and has Brass and Jade letters from the previous game.
- The Goomba: Regular spiders, which commonly appear over the first few levels and don't take much damage to kill.
- Harmless Freezing: Lazurite letters freeze enemies, stopping all their movement for 4 seconds.
- Irony: Despite the steampunk aesthetic, the game doesn't recognise the word "steampunk".
- Mechanical Insects: The rival inventor sends mechanical bugs that look like brown spiders and climb on bookshelves to steal the inventor's documents.
- Play Every Day: The game encourages you to use the word of the day on dictionary.com to deal double damage once per level. Of course, the word can turn out to be useless if it has hyphens or other special characters, and even then, it doesn't seem like the feature works these days even if you can type in that word.
- Scratch Damage: Despite the game showing 0 when enemies are hit with already used words that don't have letters from the boiler, they still take a minimal amount of damage, even if it's 0.1 or so.
- Video Game Perversity Potential: Even some perverted words can end up causing damage. "Fuck" doesn't work, but "clitoris", "faggot", and "superbitch" do.
- "X" Makes Anything Cool: The letter X is the only one that has a damage level of five. Any words that have it can deal an impressive 25 damage.
