Indolent Games is looking to add their own “cursed” video game to the scene with CliveWareGOLD, a corrupted bonus disc from another timeline. Coming to Steam and itch.io not on February 29 (because as the press release states, the date doesn’t exist because CliveWareGOLD shoudn’t exist), but actually launches on February 28.
Described as a standalone, free interactive artefact from the world of Indolent’s upcoming psychological FMV title Clive is a Good Guy (which is also due out later this year on Steam), CliveWareGOLD is styled like “a corrupted 90s WAREZ-era promo disc” and built to feel like you’ve found something you were never meant to run.
Described as “a standalone lore drop” – part digital lore packet, part glitchy throwback – CliveWareGOLD is designed as an entry point into the wider Clive is a Good Guy universe: a man unravelling across multiple personas and timelines, with the fiction leaking through UI, files, fragments and strange little systems.
Just to be clear, the game installs cleanly, with the “unstable” part being narrative, not malware.
CliveWareGOLD presents itself as an unstable early build – STRANGERSHELL_BOOTLOADER v0.9b – scraped from a corrupted backup during pre-release testing. Access is “provisional, possibly even irrational”. Players should expect memory bleed, identity echoes, and “at least one interactive pigeon.”
Here’s what’s included in this lore drop:
- Short film: Tinker Tailor Stranger Self – a fractured reflection of Clive’s psyche, presented as a missing reel that refuses to stay buried
- Trailer, timeline and lore map for the upcoming Clive is a Good Guy
- Meet the Personas – featuring nine alter-egos played by Neil Bell (Dune Part One, Star Wars: Andor, Peaky Blinders), with the option to use the in-game score or your own MP3s
- Pigeon Letters – Act 1 – an interactive fiction Easter egg with voting, endings, and hidden codes that echo forward
- Digital detritus – cryptic files, oddities, and secrets. Not a menu – a minefield
- Codes – to hidden sections and easter eggs in CliveWareGOLD and to restricted content in Clive is a Good Guy.