Lamplight City

Inspired by LucasArts and Sierra classics, Lamplight City is a point-and-click adventure game where you play as a detective investigating five different cases in an alternate history 19th century American city, reminiscent of Victorian London but with a few steampunk twists.

Narrative and characters are strong; the game had me intrigued and I was always curious to see what was going to happen. The various cases are sufficiently varied. Visuals are lovely in a retro kind of way, voice acting excellent.

My main issue is how gameplay has been excessively streamlined. Gone are the inventory and the different interactions of, say, Monkey Island or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: clicking on each hotspot automatically delivers the "correct" action to progress the plot. Problem-solving feels simplistic: in many situations you can get stuck only if you fail to click on everything. It reminds me of Unavowed, another recent adventure with likable characters but easy puzzles: Lamplight City takes the simplification even further.

There are also examples of smart design: for example, you can't initiate conversations with characters who have nothing new to say or visit locations with nothing more to do. THAT is good streamlining, as it reduces pointless backtracking and busywork for the players. I also liked that mindlessly exhausting every option in dialogue trees isn't always a good idea: if you anger a witness, you may be locked out of vital clues.

Interestingly, cases have "bad" or sub-optimal outcomes: you can accuse the wrong suspect, or maybe find the right one but, say, fail to discover where he is hiding; in general, getting the "best"ending for each case (as opposed to just finding the right culprit) involves the only truly challenging puzzles in the game.