Clutch Episode 4: Post Mortem

I wanna give a huge thank you upfront to Matt for submitting this game.

This is our third of the community submission games that we've played, and it's been an absolute blast getting to play this one.

I'll set expectations up top.

Clutch, unlike our previous community submission games, is still in play testing.

So this is not as completely and fully formed of a game as some of the others we've given feedback on.

So we might be leaning a little more in the feedback direction and in terms of like things we think will aid the playtests uh iterations towards its final form but we have lots of good things to say about this game lots of constructive stuff let's jump right into it

yeah starting off with some good stuff um i love the theming love the theming big sucker for weird west i think that a lot of the mechanics a lot of the language that the book uses helps to emulate and be very evocative for these themes i like that the book kind of swears at you sometimes.

I think that's pretty awesome.

I like that it has this focus on survival.

And you're going to be using things like guns for the majority of combat.

But then alongside that, there's also magic and psionics and all of these other twisted elements that don't just make it a survive in the desert style game and more of a survive in the desert style game, but also you can cast fireball.

I think I have gone on record saying that I am not usually a huge fan of survivalist games.

My flavor of fantasy is more like high fantasy, medieval fantasy, all that.

But I still found myself super engaged in this and really into the system of like a post-apocalyptic system, which is usually not always my jam.

I think because of the magic system and it felt really, really, really rewarding to be a magic caster and Per Matthew's request, we actually each picked one of the quote-unquote archetypes.

Obviously, because of how the game works and the character creation, you can get super creative with how you pick skills and bonds and edges, but we decided to try to inhabit a more melee physical character, a psionic character, and a magic character.

You know, I can talk more on how I feel about the magic and playing with that, but I'd love to hear from Neo and Skylar to hear, like, how did your archetype feel to play?

Well, when we were cooking up our story, we had a great time being like, oh, cool, let's be twins, and one will have powers and one won't.

And, you know, that will kind of affect their outlook on life.

And by doing that, it did, because it affected my outlook on this game.

I think Clutch... is not as rewarding if you do not lean into the weird.

As in, like, playing a null or a normal in this game is far less rewarding.

I feel like I ran into more trouble and hit more walls.

I had some friction because I specifically chose to not play a powerful or magical, psionically powerful, more magical character.

You're not completely useless if you choose to be pure melee, but you're definitely, I feel like, working against the grain of what Clutch tries to do.