Lamplight City may look like your average point-and-click adventure title, but it manages to do enough things differently to keep you on your toes the entire time. In a genre that generally expects specific solutions to puzzles that require a lot of thought on the player’s part, this game instead rolls with your decisions and forces you to as well.
In Lamplight City, you take on the role of detective Miles Fordham in an alternate 19th century Earth where steam seems to have become the dominant power source. If you’re into steampunk aesthetics, this is the point-and-click adventure game for you. The world has a rich history to it that’s slowly explored over the course of the story, and quite often, I found myself wanting to keep playing just to discover more about it.
The game features full voice acting, which is a lovely change from the norm. Everyone you interact with has something to say and adds to the feel of the investigations and overall world as the story progresses. Great care has been taken to make Lamplight City feel like a story set in a fully realised world, and it enhances your time with it immensely.
The gameplay in Lamplight City revolves around (you guessed it!) solving crimes. There’s a decent variety to these and they add to the aforementioned world building, presenting unique and mundane problems in a new light to keep them interesting. While the larger environments are par for the course when it comes to point-and-click adventures, the interactions between some NPCs are what stand out.
In some, but not all, cases when you speak to an NPC, you’ll enter a new screen where both faces are displayed alongside questions you can ask. The animation on these faces is top notch without making the game look too modern. The voice acting also comes into its own here, with the lips and face movements matching what’s being said in every way, reflecting cadence and emotion. It really brings the game to life in a way I never thought I’d care about.
Puzzles in the game aren’t the most challenging you’ll encounter, and that’s mainly because they’re contextualised in a world you can just about understand. Lamplight City does a great job of blending puzzles with the world, so you never feel out of your depth. It helps that there’s a button to show every interactable object for those moments when you’re really stuck, though. The thing that sets this game apart is that it allows for multiple outcomes in cases. You can solve a case, come up with the wrong culprit, or simply fail it due to lack of evidence. The game adapts to those outcomes, and the characters react accordingly. It’s a fresh approach and one that feels good because you’re never punished for getting things wrong, even if you want to be.
Lamplight City is a good game and has a decent story to get sucked into. However, despite a mechanic that makes it a bit more enjoyable than other games in this genre, it’s still nothing to write home about. If you’re bored of classic point-and-click adventure games though, this is something to refresh your interest once more.
Lamplight City £13.49
Summary
Lamplight City manages to breathe a little bit of new life into a tired genre, enough to keep it interesting, engaging, and surprising over multiple playthroughs.