Miles Fordham is a police detective in the city of New Bretagne, solving crimes in a steampunk world. Or at least he was. All that went wrong when he ended up in a rooftop conflict with a troublesome criminal who killed his partner, Bill, driving him away from the police force.
Unfortunately, Bill isn't prepared to rest peacefully in his grave. Instead he's decided to haunt Miles' head, acting as a sarcastic narrator with an opinion on everything and the ability to offer you occasional hints. Which is rather handy, since having given up on the police, you're working as a Private Detective to both make ends meet and try and drown out his voice. And so the two of you investigate, in this point-and-click adventure like a Victorian Randall and Hopkirk.
The game follows the traditional form of the point-and-click, but with a few twists. It doesn't use an inventory, instead things you pick up are used automatically by the game when you need them. Similarly, knowledge you discover is recorded in a casebook and again pulled up by the game. It gives the game a smoothness, and avoids that irritation of simply cycling through all permutations to advance.
Dialogue is spoken inside a close-up view, with choices to be made in how to respond to different scenarios. Will you play good cop or bad cop? Will you play both? Either way, it'll all be voiced, with a full cast for all of the characters. But which of them arranged the burying of a woman while she was still alive?
There are also a few interesting novelties, with actions to be performed using actual movement instead of a simple click. I'm hoping to see more of this in the full game, as it adds a certain pleasing interactivity. The game is also non-linear, in a manner that doesn't match the usual form of this sort of adventure game. Usually, you're solving puzzles in a sequence, and if you get stuck, you need to persist until you get past it. Often by brute force, using every single item on every possible interation point.
In this game however, it is possible to fail to solve a crime, either by collecting insufficient clues, annoying a witness enough that they stop talking to you, or accuse the wrong suspect. Admittedly, this can be solved by prolific use of the save'n'load gambit, but it's a little trickier than usual.
Fortunately, for fans of the form, there are an awful lot of things to click. The amount of effort that has been put into the world-building is impressive, with nearly all the scenery having a snippet of speech attached to it, and the various locations you can explore being reasonably varied.
That extends to the cast of characters, each of whom have their own story to tell, and their own motivations. It's a world with well-built politics and a good recognition of the possible racism and class warfare of the time, which feels more authentic than some I've seen.
I've played the first case out of I believe a possible five, and it's whetted my appetite sufficiently to look at the full game when it's out.
Lamplight City will be released on the 13th September 2018.
Tagged: Game Point and click 2D Average difficulty PC