Lamplight City

Lamplight City is a narrative-focused detective story that strives to stand out thanks to its steampunk vibes. The classic tropes of the genres have been used mildly: luddism and fear towards the new steam-based technology melds with noir vibes about a solo detective with ghosts from its past. Despite its good writing, the story is not strong enough to settle the game as a "steampunk noir" classic, but it sure is good enough to entertain the player for a few hours of above average narration. If you play for the story, this is a good mystery game with well written relationships and some introspection about love, hate, friendship and grief. Great characters and dialogues overall, but still not enough in my opinion to really stand out. The game has a decent worldbuilding, but the single detective cases can be pretty boring at times. If you play for the art and atmosphere, this is where the game really shines. Detailed scenarios, good animations, excellent lightning, outstanding voice over and background music. Tons of locations to visit, all made with love: the town is a pleasure to explore, and it's too bad that you'll visit some locations only once. If you are into steampunk and pixel art, you'll love the game aesthetics. If you play for the challenge, I'm sorry to say there isn't any here. The gameplay only consists of dialogue and exploration, with detective cases that basically solve by themselves. The main design idea of the game is punishing the player with a dead end in case they choose the wrong dialogue option in certain (few, fortunately) circumstances. I found myself cut out of gameplay just for saying "I'm a detective" instead of something else, in a situation where I had no hints about that specific answer being so dangerous. This means you'll need to save often, but overall it's not a big deal, just some frustration around the corner. The game is quite long, I'd say 10-12 hours, and that's a positive.

I liked this game. Story was good, though sometimes a bit easy. The cases were harder as they progressed. The characters were interesting. Sometimes Bill was a bit much. I noticed the homage to Gabriel Knight so that was cool. Worth buying and playing. Well done!!

Very enjoyable episodic cases. I don't enjoy when because of you dialogue choice they can become unsolvable though.

A solid detective adventure with some added Steampunk spice. It lacks some of the traditional adventure game tropes like an inventory, and the rubbing of items on other items to see what sticks, but it's still a joy to play. I also like that it has the option to get the conclusion wrong, though it's fairly obvious which one is the right one (a bit like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment). I love the mood of the game and the voice acting is solid, but if I had to pick one niggle, it would be the character portraits. There's just something off about the art style, and especially women look lumpy or have way too pronounced jaws. Either it's a conscious choice with the artist's own style, or it's something that'll get better in future games. TLDR; Great adventure game with some non-standard mechanics for point and click games.

Well made adventure - very long, loads of locations to visit, and LOTS of talking! Seeing new locations isn't something you long for though, since the art/graphics is very basic. At least it isn't cluttered with small details, so you really won't ever have to go pixelhunting. Loads of talking, loads and loads, but not much inte the way of real puzzles, as you might be used to from old point-&-click classics. On the other hand I never had to use a guide while playing this, and yet it made me feel a bit smart at one or two places that were a bit tricky maybe. It starts off real exciting, and it ends pretty interresting too with the last case (you solve 5 cases in total), but in the middle there are some cases that just drag on and are very very booring. I even gave up on one of those, since you don't need to solve all cases if you don't want to. You can make mistakes and fail at a case, or just say it's unsolvable, and move on. On a sale I guess this is a good buy, if you're into slow and talky games like this, cause everything is well made, just lots of booring story here and there...