The Gateway to Vespuccia, the City of Air and Light, Lamplight City - the thriving port city of New Bretagne is a beacon of progress and industrial advancement in the New World. Yet beneath the promises of a shining 19th-century future, the city rests upon foundations of poverty, class struggle, and...
The Gateway to Vespuccia, the City of Air and Light, Lamplight City - the thriving port city of New Bretagne is a beacon of progress and industrial advancement in the New World. Yet beneath the promises of a shining 19th-century future, the city rests upon foundations of poverty, class struggle, and crime.
For police detective turned private investigator Miles Fordham, Lamplight City's shadowy corners are just part of the territory. But with his former partner constantly speaking to him from beyond the grave, his grip on sanity is slowly loosening. Can Miles find justice for his clients and track down his partner's killer before his entire world comes apart?
Lamplight City is a detective adventure set in an alternate steampunk-ish "Victorian" past.
Be the detective you want to be. But prepare to face the consequences.
Investigate crime scenes, interrogate suspects, get information by any means necessary. Follow the law or make your own rules, but how you choose to act will affect people's attitudes towards you.
Five cases to solve, with multiple suspects, false leads, and different outcomes.
Never find yourself stuck in a dead-end situation. If the case becomes unsolvable, simply move on to the next one. The story will adapt based on your choices.
Single click interface with no inventory.
Gather clues and documents in your casebook for review. Item manipulation is handled via a context-sensitive cursor.
A fictional city with four boroughs to explore, each with their own unique flavor.
Players will visit each of these boroughs throughout the game, exploring themes such as class divide and the public's fear of emerging steam tech.
Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens.
A detective story with 5 different intriguing cases to solve, I felt immediately drawer to this game, not only because of the story and the characters, but because of the dark, victorian setting in which the game is set. The comparison to Gabriel Knight 1 is understandable, partly because of the way the dialogue functions in the game and also because the fictional city of New Bretagne reminded me of some kind of Victorian-era New Orleans. The beautiful graphics and music play a bit part in setting the mood, and I was surprised by the length of the gameplay for such an indie game. I thoroughly enjoyed this game, and hope to get more stories about Miles and his ghostly sidekick in the future :)
Lamplight City is everything I love from point and click detective games: convoluted crimes, obscure clues, twisted morality and deep characters full of personality.
Harsher in tone than say the Sherlock Holmes games of yore Lamplight city twists and turns through moral grey areas and occasional devastating brutality as it leads you through a path to save your own sanity, your relationship, and many lives you touch along the way.
I loved it, sat down and finished it in one long sitting as I couldn't stop until I was done.
Like the best detective novels Lamplight City will stay with me forever.
I wasn't sure how a puzzle game without object puzzles would go but consider me converted! It was really refreshing playing a game where you don't feel like you need to randomly click on everything but instead have to think more logically about what people are saying and how objects fit into the scenario.
I have read there are some major roadblocks if you do the wrong thing but this wasn't my experience, I solved all of the cases correctly and felt really satisfied by the logic found in the games puzzle system.
Awesome game and I really hope they make a sequel.
Lamplight City was a great game; the only flaw narratively is the brevity. I appreciated that the initial cases show the world and the characters. It simply felt to me like the final act was rushed but without a real reason for time pressure in-story.
Mechanically, I found it an interesting idea to have inventory-free puzzles. The fact that you sometimes have to pick up items in order for Fordham to work out how to use them, however, just removes the annoying inventory shuffle from the equation, while still requiring you to find specific solutions. Without spoiling, the quest to find a cup in New Bretagne drove me half-mad.
The atmosphere is what gripped me the most. The pseudo-Victorian/Cajun vibe was charming, with a clear inspiration from Gabriel Knight and Sherlock Holmes. The main characters all had excellent voice actors, though some of the extras sounded a little forced. The soundtrack was particularly interesting, always seeming quite upbeat for a murder mystery.
The negatives of the game are mostly mechanical and have more to do with the genre than the game on it's own. Until someone can work out a solution to the inventory shuffle that isn't stripping out puzzles, all adventure games will have to work with it. Additionally, the single path to truth occasionally had the usual moon-logic leaps of coincidence and luck leading Fordham to his conclusions.
Without going into spoilers, the dynamic of the two male and two female leads is excellent. Their interplay is believable, and the relationships feel relatively nuanced. Combined with the gripping world, I was devastated to finish the game so abruptly. I can only hope for a sequel giving us more time to explore the City of Air and Light beyond it's barest port. My only real objection is that we heard so many wonders of this world but encountered so few. The lack of an airship scene in particular... It would have been great hearing Bill's thoughts on flying on an explosive balloon.
