After nearly two years of radio silence following its 2023 debut, inXile Entertainment finally broke the “temporal loop” during the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2025. The studio, led by RPG legends Brian Fargo and Chad Moore, unveiled a meaty five-minute gameplay trailer that confirms one thing: Clockwork Revolution is aiming to be the most reactive, complex project in the studio’s history.
The Setting: Welcome to the Tangle
While the initial reveal focused on the gilded towers of Avalon, the 2025 trailer takes us into the soot-stained streets of The Tangle. This is the industrial underbelly of the city, where your protagonist, Morgan Vanette, and their gang, the Rotten Row Hooligans, struggle to survive.
Avalon is a steampunk metropolis ruled by the enigmatic Lady Ironwood. Through the discovery of a time-travel device known as the Chronometer, Morgan realizes that Avalon’s prosperity is a lie—Ironwood has been traveling into the past to “prune” historical events, ensuring her own rise to power while keeping the masses in poverty.
The Core Hook: The Butterfly Effect
The 2025 footage emphasized Visual Reactivity. This isn’t just about changing a few lines of dialogue; inXile is promising that your actions in the past will physically transform entire districts of Avalon in the present.
- The Chronometer: Players can travel back to key “anchor points” in history.
- Narrative Consequence: Choices you make—like saving a character or destroying a factory—can result in that character being a powerful ally in the future, or the factory being replaced by a completely different monument or slum.
- Dynamic Conversations: The trailer highlighted multi-person conversations. You can choose who to address in a group, and ignoring the wrong person can lead to permanent consequences (including their death).
Gameplay and Customization
Clockwork Revolution is a first-person RPG with a heavy emphasis on shooter mechanics and “immersive sim” elements:
- Combat: Features a mix of Victorian-era ballistics and high-tech steampunk weaponry, including lever-action rifles, modified Gatling guns, and steam-powered gadgets.
- The Character Creator: Brian Fargo described this as “one of the most expensive assets in the game.” It is a fully in-world machine where you report yourself for a crime. As you adjust your stats and appearance, the “police report” and NPC reactions shift dynamically.
- Companion: You are joined by Prentice, a small flying automaton who acts as your primary guide through the temporal chaos.
Release Window: “In Due Time”
While many hoped for a 2025 release, the trailer ended with the cheeky phrase “Coming in due time.” However, industry leaks and LinkedIn profiles from senior staff suggest that inXile is currently targeting a 2026 launch window. The game will be available day one on Xbox Game Pass, as well as for Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam/Xbox App).
As Chad Moore put it:
We are taking visual reactivity to an entirely new level.
If they can pull it off, Clockwork Revolution could be the spiritual successor to BioShock Infinite that fans have been waiting for.
