Career
Clowder has worked across media in illustration, writing and game design, as well as having tutored in gaming and digital arts at college. [1] Clowder's games, including Middens and Gingiva, are typified by their use of collage and surrealist imagery, [2] with additional watercolor art from collaborator and artist Shaina Nordlund. [3] [4] To integrate collage design in his games, Clowder used cut-up quotes from random public figures in his dialog, [5] and cited an interest in the reuse of "morbid medical texts, bone atlases and zoographic curios" as visual references. [6] Clowder's games, which were created with RPG Maker, have been cited as a range of notable experimental games made using the engine. [7] [8] [9]
Works
Clowder's debut game, Middens, was released on GameJolt under the pseudonym Takamo on 13 September 2012. [10] He stated Middens was an artistic experiment to explore collage and pixel art within the medium of a video game. [6] Writing for Rock Paper Shotgun , Porpentine commended the uniqueness of the game's "brilliant, alien world" and stated the game's writing was "consistently interesting", "sly, playful [and] sinister". [4] Eurogamer praised the game as "unlike anything else out there" comparing the game to 90s role-playing games and surrealist art. [3] Comparing the game to the work of Viktor Shklovsky's discourse on defamiliarization, Owen Vince of Arcade Review stated the game "does its level best to unnerve and bewitch you with how it looks and sounds" with the purpose of exploring the "unfamiliar spaces occupied in the reality of the lives of routine things". [11] Describing the game as "open-ended" and "more overly sinister" than Clowder's other works, William Huang of Pelican Magazine praised the game's "fascinating symbolism", open-ended exploration and character design, although found the game's music and combat "slightly underwhelming" and "formulaic" due to the use of the RPG Maker engine. [5] A sequel, Gingiva, a spiritual successor to Middens, was published by Clowder on GameJolt on 13 September 2012. [12] [2]
Clowder's third game, Where They Cremate the Roadkill, was published on Steam on 30 September 2017, [13] following a successful Kickstarter project in 2015 to fund the game. [14] [6] The game is similarly an action-role-playing game in which players travel between three dimensions as a spirit tasked with killing bodies to collect souls for the devil, whilst avoiding being caught. [14] Clowder stated development of the game was created over a longer process, and was designed with a multi-layered narrative, "like the concentric rings in a tree or stacked nesting dolls". [1] Choli Rad of IGN stated the game was one of the best indie games of the year, highlighting its "fantastical hand-drawn art" and that "it must really be played to be understood". [15] William Huang of Pelican Magazine considered the game to have a greater level of animation and diversity than its predecessors, clearer progression, and more cohesive dialogue, whilst finding the game's text could be "ideological" and its combat remained "quite rusty". [16] Where They Cremate the Roadkill was Clowder's last game, stating an interest to move on and potentially explore other mediums. [1]