Clam Man 2: Open Mic

This is a preview/demo of a creative and funny non-combat RPG with a bunch of questlines that can be done in addition to the main quest of gathering jokes for the MC's daily stand-up comedy routine. The quest lines in this preview already hooked me, now I really need the full game.

[b]Recommended [/b] “Comedy is hard. Being a clam is harder.” Clam Man 2: Open Mic blends light RPG elements, choice‑driven storytelling and comedy, all wrapped in a world of sea creatures with very human problems. Clam Man drops you into a world where every character is a sea creature with more emotional baggage than an airport carousel, and somehow it works. The story is simple, the jokes miss more often than they land and the voiced dialogue carries the whole thing like a very determined shrimp. Gameplay is basically: Make a choice Pray to the dice gods Watch your life fall apart or somehow improve It’s not D&D, but the dice still wake up every morning choosing violence. You play as Clam Man, an aspiring comedian trying to impress the Triad — three basement‑dwelling stand‑up gurus who each have their own philosophy on how to win over the audience. Your job is to pick jokes, survive social interactions, watch everyone’s reaction and pretend you know what you’re doing. The best part?[b] Failure isn’t a punishment. [/b] Botch a roll? Pick the wrong option? Accidentally insult someone? The game just shrugs and sends you down a different path. Even in this short demo, there are multiple ways to solve problems depending on your skills, your luck and how much chaos you’re willing to embrace. Good luck or bad luck — the dice decide. You’re just here for the ride.

Clam man is a great IP, and has potential to be added into the universe of Rick and Morty. It is not easy to make a game, not mention to have it packed with punchlines and jokes, a system to personalize traits and some dices to randomize outcomes. After reading about this solo game programmer, I’ll just put out a thumb up here and hope for this game to become Overwhelmingly Positive one day.

I had a great time playing the game! The humor, style, and dialogues are all top-notch. The game is already on my wishlist, and I can’t wait for its release. I hope it only gets better from here. P.S. It would be really cool if we could check our stats during the game — sometimes I felt like I was missing that feature. Although, maybe I just didn’t find where to do it.

"Clam Man 2: Open Mic" is is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Clan Man 2". Clan Man 2 is a comedy themed glorified browser game that's more like an e-book... just 2D cartoony browser graphics and a bunch of poorly written e-book text you need to click through, with some pointless "RPG" stats bolted on that are mostly meaningless. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Clan Man 2, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Clam Man 2: Open Mic" too. Usually the purpose of these advertisements is to get you to shell out money to the developer to buy the full product, but the developer hasn't bothered actually making a product you can buy, leaving this as an advertisement for nothing. We must question what value this pointless advertising has for gamers... and the answer is "none". Due to the poor public response amongst gamers for this advertisement, it seems unlikely the developer will go on to make the full product... this advert was published 5 years ago, yet the browser game this is advertising never eventuated. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.

A narrative RPG, fun, witty, combat-free, and dice-roll based. All big pluses for me in a genre oversaturated with battles and reused tropes. In this game, you play as a budding comedian with skills tailored to your goal. You navigate situations in the city (some hilariously surreal) and turn them into jokes to add to your repertoire. I discovered it while looking for games similar to Disco Elysium. It’s fair to say the gameplay is similar enough, but completely different in every other aspect. I recommend giving it a try since it’s just the prologue and free. I can’t wait for the full game to release.

If Esoteric Ebb is a Disco Elysium successor, then Clam Man 2 is an Esoteric Ebb successor.