Lamplight City

This game had a lot of potential and now I regret buying it. First the parts I liked are the art style, the atmosphere/setting, and the protagonist. There are two main problems that I did not like. First is that you get a constant companion whom comments on EVERYTHING you do. A trope that is taken from the Blackwell series, except in this one the voice actor is annoying and talks with a long island accent. Most of what he says is very modern real life sounding that jolts me right out of the game. Imagine playing and George Costanza commenting on everything you do in a sarcastic way. I wanted to play this game on mute. It ties into the problem of about half the characters are good and the other half have terrible modern issues dialogue. Its very heavy handed and not atmospheric. The other problem that made me write this review is that you can get stuck on a mission and cant advance the game. Mission 4 to be exact. It is so easy to fail in this game and you have no idea why. You have to talk to people in a certain order and avoid certain topics or else you fail. The first puzzle was a music puzzle that I couldnt figure out, then there were no other puzzles that I found. Failing an earlier mission can force you to fail later missions. This is not fun in the least. I was expecting branching consequences and real detective work. It could have been excellent but bad writing, bad voice acting and poor implementation drag this down.

Pretty fun! You're tasked with solving five mysteries, each of which I found to be compelling and complex. The protagonist was a bit too one-dimensional for my tastes, and some of the writing was a little ham-fisted. However, I really enjoyed the mystery-solving aspect of the game (where you collect clues, interrogate persons of interest, etc.), which felt pretty similar to Frogware's Sherlock Holmes series or Wadjet Eye's Blackwell series. If you're looking for a deep story or interesting characters, this game probably isn't for you. However, if you just want to play at being a detective, this game is a pretty good choice.

The pluses are many. Great art Interesting dialog Complex relationships A flawed main character. Excellent stories as per each case and an overall story. Some of the voice acting. However, there are some minuses. As mentioned by others you can easily get locked out if you pick the wrong dialog choice. There should be an autosave or some other device that allows you to quickly return to the point where you "goofed up". Some of the voice acting is mediocre including, unfortunately, the main character. There are very few puzzles or action sequences. Overall a good adventure game that could have been better.

This is not an adventure game. It's more like a visual novel with VERY little adventure game elements and game-play. You go around talking to people and just when you think it's time to play the game, you end up talking to someone else. Just talking and talking and talking with more talking, till I fell asleep. Not sure why the developer didn't just write abook instead because it's hard to call this a video game. I credit the "game" for its visuals, voice acting and music... but the game is a snooze fest. I'm all about story but there has to be a balance between GAME-PLAY and story. Maybe if the story was amazing I would give it a higher score but it's not. Very unoriginal. This is a game for people who don't like playing video games. If you think this is going to be like a classic Adventure game - just warning you, it's not. Save your money.

While this game certainly does fall in the category of point & click adventures, it's not exactly a typical example of the genre. Instead of picking up and combining objects you pick up clues from conversations with NPCs to identify suspects of the crimes you're investigating or unluck more dialog options with other NPCs. Gameplay in this respect is more similar to the "Sherlock Holmes" games than it is to "Monkey Island" or "Broken Sword". Unfortunately combining the clues is mostly automatic here, unlike in the "Sherlock Holmes" games where you combine clues interactively to reach a conclusion (which is a more satisfying experience). Also, there are some (rare) situations where an item inventory would have been a more fitting means of interaction. That the game may prevent you from identifying the correct culprit if you manage to alienate an NPC (something other reviewers have criticized) is correct, but something I would consider only logical, because in that situation your character is lacking the evidence required to substantiate the accusation. The game has a working save/restore feature to deal with this kind of situation. All in all the gameplay is satisfying, though, and the Steampunk setting is done quite well. What doesn't work so well is that the game gets quite preachy far too often, which detracts from the experience. The voice acting is average at best. And even with 2D graphics: if you move character sprites towards the front or back of a room you need to scale the sprites properly, otherwise it'll look like the characters are growing/shrinking as they move. All things considered I'd rate "Lamplight City" an above average game, if you can tolerate its preachiness. Otherwise you may want to avoid it.