"You are a child of Skoro and Sor will never forgive you!"
— High Priest T. Krumach
Like Clay is a 2017 Indie horror-themed First-Person Adventure game developed by free08games.
An old classmate of yours, Tom Kemer, has gone missing. Worried about him, his mother sends you his last known address, where you yourself rent an apartment to look into his disappearance. A note left for the previous tenant leads you to a cult known as the Children of Sor. As you head deeper into their mysteriously empty compound, accompanied only by the voice of their high priest over the speakers, strange events begin to occur that make you question your sanity just as the cult members before you.
This game exhibits the following tropes:
- Anti-Frustration Features: If you get the bad ending first, the game will put you back at a checkpoint where the good ending is still available. Unfortunately, this is not true the other way around. The good ending has a checkpoint after the branch.
- Big Bad: The demon deep under the apartment building orchestrated the events of the game.
- Bittersweet Ending: You find out what happened to your friend and banish the demon that was responsible for what happened at the apartment, but everyone is still dead by the time you find them.
- Blaming the Victim: The High Priest explains that the faithful have nothing to fear from Sor's spiders because they only attack sinners. If someone is being attacked, then they obviously deserved it and it shouldn't make you concerned.
- Cain and Abel: According to the Children of Sor, Sor and Skoro were brothers, but Skoro eventually betrayed Sor, becoming an enemy of his people.
- Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Children of Sor is Christianity turned on its head. It has a God of Good in Sor and tempting Fallen Angel in Skoro. However, instead of Jesus dying for humanity's sins, Sor expects humanity to die for him.
- Cult: The Children of Sor that the game revolves around worship a god named Sor.
- Cult Defector: Several characters throughout the game attempt to help each other leave the cult.
- "Friends" Rent Control: You discover that your unemployed friend doesn't even actually have an apartment at the address you were given, but him and many other cult members are illegally subletting in Daniel's apartment. You can actually find a note from the landlord giving them a stern warning about doing this.
- God Guise: The demon itself admits that Sor doesn't exist and is just an invention used to manipulate the High Priest. Of course, since everything "Sor" did that made the High Priest believe in him were actually being supernaturally done by the demon, why it needed to create a false identity at all remains a question.
- Have a Nice Death: On Steam, if you jump into the sacrifice pit yourself and die you get an achievement with the description "It wasn't worth it."
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Essentially the argument of the demon, who explains that it only gave the High Priest the idea for the cult, with the High Priest coming up with the twisted methods to run the cult all on his own without any prodding.
- Hunting the Rogue: The Children of Sor get increasingly serious about hunting down those trying to defect.
- Irony: Despite the High Priest demanding you leave and insisting you don't belong, you pass all of the cult's trials in record time. By the cult's own logic you're practically a Chosen One, not exactly the sort of person you'd expect to expose the cult's deepest secrets.
- Kill the God: Sor's original worshippers burned his temple down with him still inside, necessitating his resurrection in the present.
- Late to the Tragedy: By the time you enter the cult's compound, almost everyone but the High Priest is already dead, and even he dies just as you reach him.
- Multiple Endings:
- The Bad Ending, acquired by simply beating the game, has you banish the demon at the cost of trapping you deep underground where you wait until you die, leaving the events of the game a mystery for the rest of the world.
- The Good Ending, acquired by securing your way back out with items to prop open the paths you take, has you banish the demon before heading back out to call the police who find the bodies of the cult members and bring closure to their families.
- Mystery Cult: The cult has four (secretly five, reserved for the High Priest himself) levels, and each one learns a little bit more about how the cult works. They start out being told it's a religion of love and mercy, before learning about the various tortures they will have to endure to advance. The final secret is that the entire cult exists so they can sacrifice themselves to bring back Sor.
- No Ontological Inertia: In the Good Ending, as you head back up through the complex, you'll notice that everything conjured by the demon is now gone.
- The Old Gods: Sor was once an angel of the Old Ones.
- One-Steve Limit: The friend you are searching for is named Tom Kemer. The High Priest of the Children of Sor is usually referred to his initials T.K. His mailbox, however, proves that his name is T. Krumach.
- Public Secret Message: The cult defectors communicate using notes that the loyal members find before long. However, since the defectors use pseudonyms, the loyalists still don't know who they are, and even leave messages on the notes themselves, hoping to narrow down who the traitors are.
- Rewatch Bonus: Near the end of the game, you discover that the High Priest had a two-way mirror looking into your apartment. If you stand near that wall near the beginning of the game, you can actually hear the High Priest breathing and walking behind it.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: The defectors are wrong about the supernatural events being conditioning or hallucinations. They really are supernatural. However, they are right that Sor is not real and that the cult ultimately isn't well-meaning.
- Save Your Deity: The goal of the Children of Sor is to bring Sor back.
- Self-Harm: The High Priest explains that a possible way to drive away Skoro is to harm yourself in order to show that your devotion to Sor is so great that he cannot tempt you. Later, the player has to drive nails into themselves in order to survive an attack from Skoro.
- Spiders Are Scary: Spiders are the servants of Sor and aren't supposed to be scary to his followers. They are a constant obstacle for the player, however, since your actions threaten the Children of Sor.
- Story Breadcrumbs: The story mostly unfolds via notes left behind by the members of the cult and messages the High Priest recorded for his fellow priests. This includes both worldbuilding and puzzle hints.
- Sudden Soundtrack Stop: When you return to the apartment proper later in the game, all of the ambient sound effects from neighboring apartments, such as the piano playing, are now gone. This not only creates an unsettling atmosphere, it proves how much control "Sor" really has in preventing your escape. Likewise, during your escape in the good ending, all of these things have returned.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Despite being a horror-themed game, the Children of Sor is not a cabal of pentagram-scribbling black magic wielders practicing dark rituals, but a realistically sympathetic group of down-on-their-luck people taken advantage of by a normal man with a complex. The defectors suspect the supernatural occurrences around them are induced hallucinations to keep them dependent. Even when it's revealed that there really is a demon behind everything, he admits that almost everything was the mortal human's idea making the supernatural not the real threat in the game.
- Too Dumb to Live: In-universe, the cult defectors call your friend Tom foolish for using his real name on their secret messages. He doesn't care because he's loyal to the cult. This ends up backfiring on him, though, when he eventually does get cold feet, and it makes it very easy for the cult to capture, torture, and kill him.
- Tough Love: Sor argues that he was strict with his worshippers because of his love for them.
- Worldbuilding: Some of the notes in the game aren't plot relevant or help with puzzles, but are a logical element of what would be in a real place. For instance, you can find several notes from the landlord complaining about the cult playing gongs and illegally subletting apartments.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: The Children of Sor eventually capture one of the traitors by having one of their loyalists pretend to be a defector in need of help to escape the cult.
