Dropsy the Clown walks an emotional tightrope

The fear of clowns is something that people talk about more than they actually feel.

These days, clown-phobia feels like a kind of a bad joke everyone is in on, without any emotional trauma to back it up. This modern “fear” of clowns dominated the early part of GamesBeat’s in-house demo of Dropsy (which featured an actual clown brought in by publisher Devolver Digital), an upcoming adventure game from Tendershoot and A Jolly Corpse. Director-designer Jay Tholen had no qualms about stoking that discomfort with clowns — fake or not — in his game of largely pleasant appearances.