Lamplight City

Coming off of playing a Golden Wake and Shardlight, Grundislav games newest addition is their best one yet. The dialogue, characters and storytelling are the greatest strengths of Lamplight City. The music and voice acting are both very good and even the political commentary in the game was a good addition, if a bit hamfisted. Graphically the game is gorgeous for its mid 90's palette, and the production is A quality throughout all the art design. My two main gripes with the game are threefold: first, you get locked out of locations and content if you pick a wrong dialogue choice, even if it seems non-conspicuous. You have no way of knowing if you failed a dialogue check either until you look at the achievements you can unlock and see that you missed out on the "correct" suspect. This should really be patched or another system put in or make the puzzle more difficult to solve if the dialogue check failed (like Fallout: New Vegas). Unavowed system worked better, with giving you all the information and letting you choose how to solve a case determined by the background information you provide and your choice of sidekick. My second gripe is that it follows Gabriel Knight 1 way too closely, almost to the point of blatantly ripping it off. It permeates every aspect of Lamplight City, even to the point of asking questions about Voodoo, living in a French Quarter of a city, and vising above-ground mausoleums. Heck, you could trade out Miles, Bill and Adelaide for Gabriel, Mosley and Grace and the game could have fit perfectly in a Gabriel Knight setting. There was a lot of deja vu moments that went beyond being just "inspired by." Finally, I wish there were more logic puzzles and inventory options because there were next to none. It made the game feel hollow as a point-and-click adventure and more like a visual novel. It's definitely worth $15. Just make sure you are saving in multiple save slots as you go.

Lamplight City is a steam punk, detective noir themed adventure game. You play as a detective, solving crimes to pay the rent, while trying to keep out of the way of the police. The game has multiple paths and it matters how you treat the people you meet. As in all adventure games, save early, save often! I really enjoyed the music. It's the perfect accompaniment to playing the game and I ended up humming along quit a bit. I would recommend this to everybody but especially if you enjoy games with interesting choices and problems to solve in a strong story.

Lamplight City spends most of its time wishing that it was Sins of the Fathers and gently nudging the player to wish so, too. Billing itself as a detective game feels in LC's case like grasping for definition in an adventure game that eschews the genre's defining difficulties. With no action set, no inventory, and a surprisingly shallow set of bad consequences for trying, there's essentially no reason not to simply click on everything possible until the case is solved. It's interesting to see something attempt to streamline what I can imagine some consider the drawbacks of adventure games, but the result simply feels clunky without having replaced that content with something more suited to the final product. Objectives don't track well with what you've done, clues are simply too easy to acquire, and the kind of critical thinking a detective game might demand simply doesn't come up. By and large, I found the experience disappointing and, above all, incomplete. The game feels more rushed as it progresses with later elements feeling either tacked on or abruptly cut off. Theoretically a "steampunk Victorian" world, the atmosphere doesn't feel like it gets the chance to establish itself. The game falls over itself to capture the zeitgeist of automation anxiety but rarely bothers to actually demonstrate it. What are stated driving motivations for characters simply aren't witnessed. Instead, we follow around another messy-haired, black-coated, detective type who can't sleep properly surrounded by New Orleanian architecture and Creole culture, but without the upsides of origin, development, and Tim Curry.

While I am writing this review, the most upvoted review here on GoG is called "deficient gameplay" and basically states: "If you're looking for a traditional adventure with challenging puzzles, you'll be disappointed because there aren't any." And that is true. But I think it does miss the point. This is *NOT* a classic point and click one. This is much closer to something like "The Last Express", an experience that puts story and atmosphere first, instead of combining items from an inventory or solving logic puzzles. Much of the gameplay is indeed listening to fabulously well acted dialog and exhausting all the options. As such, your enjoyment of this game is directly related to how much you find that fun. If you like good stories and audio dramas, it is perfect for you. If you prefer to be engaged by the game all the time, you might want to avoid this one. But this is the game's core appeal, this is not deficient. This *IS* still a game, an interactive story. More traditional puzzles are few and far between, but they exist. Most of the time though, it is a matter of "how to get the next piece of information" and for that you have to consider what you know about the characters, about the context and about the situation. Sometimes, the game requires you to pick between multiple dialog options and some can lock you out of certain paths and solutions... ...and again: You have to consider what you know about the characters, about the context, about the situation and then determine the best course of action. Yes, you can deny yourself some paths if you fail but why is that a bad thing? I consider it exceptionally hard to be that bad of a detective to actually reach the game's fail-state, at least when playing the game with the right mindset. This is not a game to beat, it is a game to experience. Make no mistake, there is a difference between having little friction in my game experience and running through on autopilot. This is the former, and it was fabulous!