Clam Man is an adventure game created by Team Clam so even though it's available on Steam, it's still not "by Valve." If you thought that joke was bad, not to worry because most of the ones in Clam Man are much better. Nominally a graphic "point and click" adventure game Clam Man is relatively light on the genre's usual inventory puzzles - it has a handful later on, and a single incongruous logic grid puzzle that you can choose to make a lot easier - so for the most part your goal is to walk around examining objects and talking to NPCs and having a sensible chuckle or two at whatever the game throws back at you, until you hit upon the right prompt and the story progresses to the next scene.

Clam Man, who is a clam man with an unusually literal name, lives in the aquatic city of Snacky Bay with other sapient piscinefolk and works as an office drone at the local mayonnaise company, fielding stupid phone calls about mayonnaise all day. He is let go suddenly and arbitrarily after an interminable analogy about fruit pies from his boss, decides to dig further into this surprise dismissal and that of a fellow employee the previous day, and picks up the scent of a conspiracy involving mobster molluscs and embezzled jars of mayo. The story's relatively thin and brief and really just serves to funnel you through a series of comedic situations, with each of the game's "scenes" lasting barely ten minutes or so but with enough of a joke-per-minute ratio to justify their presence in the story. The humor is... well, humor is a wholly subjective thing but I personally found Clam Man pretty funny. It has a certain insouciance about the wellbeing and dignity of its hero, like most quality point and clicks of a similar comedic bent, and scatters in just as many references as is tolerable. It also likes its meta jokes; a neighbor knows that the protagonist got fired because the downbeat song that played as Clam Man took the long subway train (and bus) home mentioned it several times.

Clam Man is markedly and deliberately streamlined when it comes to the gameplay conventions of the graphic adventure format. There are objects lying around to collect and you have an inventory to store them in, but the process of grabbing and using them is frequently done automatically: Clam Man (the man clam, not the game) tends to use any required items after selecting a relevant dialogue choice, without needing you to dig that item out and use it on a hotspot directly. Oddly, I did need to drag an inventory item onto a hotspot a couple times to solve one particular puzzle, but this was an exception to the rule that maybe the developers couldn't find an easier way around (not that it was too challenging regardless). For the most part you only have the one interact button to worry about; the game exists as this odd bridge between the wall o' verbs of older LucasFilm games and the more hands-off approach utilized by visual novels and other modern adventure games that prune down the number ways you can interact with the world for the sake of spinning its yarn in peace. Hints at more elaborate systems are purely facetious: trying to get into a nightclub includes a dialogue prompt to use a "speech check" with your current "speech stat" shown in a square parenthetical, but is clearly a gag. The game isn't really taking itself too seriously however, and this more passive approach that lets you focus on the goofs is another aspect of that.

We're at that point in any adventure game review like this where I realize that the only things left to do are to spoil the central conspiracy mystery or to spoil more of the jokes, so maybe I should quit while I'm ahead. Clam Man is not going to take you a long time to complete, nor will it exercise your gray matter too rigorously, but it should hopefully make you laugh a few times as you soak in what feels like a very '90s comedy adventure setting built around the woes of adulthood and gainful employment, self-effacing gags, meta commentary on the genre, an elective amount of sarcasm, and bizarre, memorable side-characters which mostly exist for flavor and bon mots. Given the age of some of the references I'm sure the creator(s) grew up on the same games and comedy media I did, so in that respect it was kinda nice to be the target demographic again. I can definitely get tired of the anti-humor shitposting Zoomers are into, but I suppose that's my own damn fault for spending so much time on Twitter.

So... yeah, Clam Man. If you find it on sale, or were able to pick up that Racial Justice and Equality Itch.io bundle from last year and therefore already own a DRM-free copy you probably didn't know you had, it's worth the couple hours of your time it requests from you. It appears as if its sequel might be shaping up to be something even better and more ambitious, so it wouldn't hurt to get in on the ground floor of the Clam Man universe here and now either. As we chowderboys like to say, you gotta clam up or shut up.

Rating: 4 out of 5.