Reviews

Lamplight City | PC Review

“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.”

Lamplight City

Veteran Creator

Lamplight City is the new point+click adventure game by Grundislav Games. Grundislav Games is Francisco Gonzalez, who can be considered a veteran of the adventure game genre, since he’s been creating games since 2001. He started making games professionally with Wadjet Eye Games, whose latest release was Unavowed. You can see the influence of working on those earlier games in this Steampunk detective thriller, where you play former police detective turned private investigator Miles Fordham, who is on the hunt for the person he holds responsible for his partner’s death.

A New Approach

Gonzalez introduces some things into this game that may startle hardcore adventure players, but will make for smoother gameplay for inexperienced ones. The most obvious example of this is the lack of inventory. When you pick up items, you will use them automatically when needed. This took a bit of getting used to for me, but it sure helps with the flow of the story, as you don’t have to figure out what items to use for what.

Lamplight City

Another feature is that if you get stuck on a case, you can try and solve it and move on to the next case. This means you might not get the correct solution to the case, but you can still finish the game. The final and most exciting new aspect of the game ties into this, and it is that actions and choices have consequences. Suspects and witnesses react to your questions, answers, and actions in ways that might lead you to a dead end. I shocked a character so much he wouldn’t allow me to talk to another character, thus making me unable to correctly close the case. This is an interesting choice in story-driven gaming that is put to good use.

A World Of Steam And Punks

I had fun with this game. It’s clearly developed with a lot of love, and it looks and sounds great. The voice actors really bring the characters to life, the pixel art looks fantastic, it plays smoothly, and the central characters are fun to spend time with. Lamplight City manages to circumvent the usual detective cliches by adding a supernatural element that I won’t spoil here. Setting it in a Steampunk Victorian age city called Vespuccia in an alternative USA with its own politics, history and mythology adds a great atmosphere to the game. It’s most certainly a setting that I hope will be explored more in future games, as I sense there are many more stories to be told in this universe.

Lamplight City

Time To Kill

I spent slightly under 15 hours on the game to play it through. I will replay it to see what other choices amount to, but I found myself wanting to spend more time in this world. The game definitely leaves you wanting more cases to solve and the main storyline produces a very good story. It’s not the most difficult point+click game, but there’s enough story and features to keep experienced and new players happy. I would actually recommend playing the game with only saving at the start of a new chapter, as you experience the consequences of your choices best that way. Ron Gilbert would be proud. And to top it off you unlock a nice little extra when you finish the game.

Lamplight City

$14.99
8

The Final Verdict

8.0/10

Pros

  • Beautiful pixel graphics
  • Great voice acting and score
  • Interesting new features for the genre
  • Good world building

Cons

  • Relatively short
  • Not too difficult
  • Purists might find some changes sacrilege
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Tomas Becks

1984 was a magical year for Tomas, because that’s when his father brought home the legendary Commodore 64 and a lifelong love affair with games and especially adventure games began. He was late to the party with consoles, but now he uses his PS4 for more than playing blu-rays of Marvel movies. He’s also a fervent mobile gamer, but his heart still belongs mostly to the stories of his beloved adventure games. Besides games and movies he’s also a fan of board games, tabletop roleplaying games, comics, craft beers and liquorice. He’s a long time listener of both the Gaming Outsider and the Hollywood Outsider and made his podcasting debut with the GO crew in August 2018 on his first visit to the US.

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