This game does not shy away from the hard topics!įrankly, I found it refreshing. Without going into spoilers, I was irked when my main character asked for the male owner of a shop, surprised to learn a woman was the proprietor I was prickled on learning how women wanting to enroll in university were viewed and I was downright appalled at the treatment of people of color throughout the city. This game shows a dark and disturbingly believable side of society that is hauntingly relevant to a modern era gamer. Classism, sexism, and racism are all very much a thing in this steampunk Victorian world. What I didn’t expect was the diversity of themes represented in the storytelling. When I went into this game for review, what I was expecting was a series of interesting mysteries, engaging characters, and some good old puzzle solving. When you nail your lead, it feels no less satisfying, and I was grinning ear to ear when the police showed up to arrest my chosen suspect after the first case. The emphasis in Lamplight isn’t on clever item use but rather your detective skills: noticing small clues, questioning suspects and witnesses, and stringing together your investigation. But as the game progressed, I came to love this stark, clean system. At first I missed the puzzle solving that comes from having a bottomless pocket from which you retrieve items to throw at your environment, manipulating it until it bends to your superior will. Sometimes you will pick up items for use later, but they are always brought up in the context of interacting with the right object at the right moment. Do you want the lazy way out? Are you looking to confirm some of your preconceived notions? How deeply do you want to dig? You might be surprised just how deep some rabbit holes go and what you’re capable of if you push yourself.Īnother of Lamplight City’s derivations from other point-and-clicks is a lack of inventory system. However, characters will remember your actions from chapter to chapter, and your overall game arc will suffer or soar for your choices. In one of Lamplight’s first unique twists, you’re free to accuse anyone you collect enough evidence on to establish both method and motive. No player should be locked out from enjoying a good story. In terms of accessibility, Francisco told me that his aim wasn’t to create cases that tested the absolute limits of your wit and reason in keeping with modern adventure games’ improvements over times of old, you’re not expected to be Sherlock Holmes at the cost of actually being able to play the video game. In either case, how “well” you play won’t impede your ability to enjoy the engaging story and characters. People who like to wring every last penny out of their purchases will have plenty to see and do with this title, while those who want to play once and take the ending they earn will feel equally satisfied. Do well and you’ll play the fifth and final case, netting you either “the ok ending” or “the very good ending.” If that’s not enough replayability for you, there are also 42 achievements (a purposeful choice) you can hunt during your playthroughs, calling for multiple path runs to collect them all. In a short interview I had at PlayNYC with Francisco, Grundislav Games’s founder and a man with an impeccable knowledge of classic adventure games, I was told that Lamplight City will have a total of five cases (not including the intro chapter) and four endings! Two of these are achievable even if you bungle all your detective work, though they’ll net you what were described as “the sad ending” and “the jerk ending” after the forth case. You get beautifully rendered environments, believable and quirky characters, excellent voice acting, an atmospheric soundtrack, intriguing cases to solve, a narrative hook that ties the game’s intro case through its subsequent chapters, and more. And let me be clear, you get a lot of game for your fifteen bucks. With Lamplight City, you get all the staples you’d expect from a top-notch adventure game, while some of the finer particulars are nudged into their own brand of uniqueness. I am simply floored nowadays at how different designers, like artists given the same set of paints and canvas, come up with such different takes on their art.
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