Reader reviews for Lamplight City

As for voiceacting, scenery, music..all top notch except the sidekick sometimes became really annoying. It made me click less to observe the items in the room as he would say the same tiresome cynical things.

Anyways, good game if you like to play as a detective. Def worth checking out. 3,5/5

If you play for the story, this is a good mystery game with well written relationships and some introspection about love, hate, friendship and grief. Great characters and dialogues overall, but still not enough in my opinion to really stand out. The game has a decent worldbuilding, but the single detective cases can be pretty boring at times.

If you play for the art and atmosphere, this is where the game really shines. Detailed scenarios, good animations, excellent lightning, outstanding voice over and background music. Tons of locations to visit, all made with love: the town is a pleasure to explore, and it’s too bad that you’ll visit some locations only once. If you are into steampunk and pixel art, you’ll love the game aesthetics.

If you play for the challenge, I’m sorry to say there isn’t any here. The gameplay only consists of dialogue and exploration, with detective cases that basically solve by themselves. The main design idea of the game is punishing the player with a dead end in case they choose the wrong dialogue option in certain (few, fortunately) circumstances. I found myself cut out of gameplay just for saying “I’m a detective” instead of something else, in a situation where I had no hints about that specific answer being so dangerous. This means you’ll need to save often, but overall it’s not a big deal, just some frustration around the corner.

The game is quite long, I’d say 10-12 hours, and that’s a positive.

The main problem is, that there is actually nothing to really do in this game. It’s an interactive novel in the true sense of the word. It’s click - dialogue - click - dialogue - change of location - click - dialogue… The game doesn’t even provide an inventory, so practically you can’t use anything to anywhere!

Now, usually I don’t think that games can contain too much dialogue, but this time I ...actually did. Though i’m not really certain is it the amount of it, or the fact that the conversations are unimaginative and quite pointless in many occations. This combined to the interactive novel -concept, makes this matter even more pressing.

The voice acting is okay for the most part, but it certainly isn’t the shining virtue of this game. Some characters are actually quite painful to listen to, and, unfortunately Bill is one of them, and we’ll hear him a LOT. Best actor is the one providing the voice for Addy. She’s emotinal and vibrant.

The best score of Lamplight City comes certainly from the heartwarming vintage graphics and nice soundwork. The cases are interesting enough, but the detective playground is appallingly small, and the conversation choises really tend to take away rather than give, like the game’s official reviewer said.

In the end, its a nice game with overflowing amount of dialogue and nothing to actually do, but on the other hand, its certainly easy on the eyes and ears.