To say that I was wary with Lamplight City is an understatement. While I did enjoy Shardlight to a degree, it had too many faults. And lots of those faults were also found in greater amounts in the prior game by Grundislav Games – A Golden Wake. But, after some time I’ve decided to give it a chance. And I’m very glad that I have done that as it turned out to be a really pleasant surprise.
Just like the prior projects by Grundislav Games, this project runs on Adventure Game Studio. Which, as usual, has its own quirks. It looks nice, but runs at specific resolutions and the game has letterboxing, there are certain technical limitations to it, but honestly, with how many wonderful projects have been released on it in the past decade, people seem to know how to make the engine run nicely. Besides, most importantly it does everything you’d want from a point and click adventure game with a more classic mindset.
Though, while the controls and many concepts are “classic”, how the game works is a rather fresh take on a mystery/detective adventure. For one, the game shifts attention completely from the usual inventory management, to “clues” and “suspects”, focusing far more on interviewing people and solving problems, rather than figuring out puzzles. It’s far from the first to do that, of course, but the way it’s handled in the game is really nicely done. Dialogues are often important and most curiously, you often get into talks where you can screw your investigation by saying something you don’t want to. It’s never overplayed, most of these situations are well made and work more like a check for player attention, rather than being just a “you chose wrong, reload game”. Every investigation has several suspects you can uncover and you can accuse any of the ones that you’ve gotten enough evidence against or, either through choice or blocking your own investigation due to mistakes, can even claim that the case cannot be resolved. All of which has consequences and leads to different endings.
I must stress, that this non-linearity is genuinely impressive and I cannot help but respect how much effort was spent on this and how often it works splendidly. And yet… The focus on making sure that every little variation is somehow acknowledged at later points (including across all cases), seemingly led to somewhat rushed moments that happen from time to time in each case. A surprisingly quick resolution here, really weird expectation from the player there and the game does become less enjoyable occasionally. It never gets really bad and the amount of effort spent on making sure your playthrough with the characters shaped by your actions will be fun to go through are commendable. But it really can’t always stick the landing.
That said, I really enjoyed playing Lamplight City. It’s a very fresh take on investigation games, it knows how to split it’s narrative into smaller cases in a really wonderful way, it has solid characters, good script and voice acting and it’s a story that I was happy to experience. If you like adventure titles and/or mystery novels, this game is definitely worth checking out.