Shardlight

"Broken trust
Ideas lost
Burn in time
Laid to rest
Look at lies
Broken dies"

 

KMFDM - Craze

 

 

Maybe you've played too many adventure game puzzles if your first thought on seeing a blank piece of paper is "obviously I now need to find some charcoal to make a rubbing of... whatever's up ahead" (plan B: lemon juice)

Also, how am I not sick of Abe Goldfarb's voice yet?

 

Anyhoo, I thought in between gigantic open worlds or turn-based strategy campaigns, it might be nice to polish off another adventure title ambling through my Wadjet Eye collection. Cue post-collapse raven death cult. Turned out pretty decent, though the setting is more interesting than the line-by-line wordsmithing.

"Reaper be damned, I'll go out my own way" indeed, and hey, nice visual foreshadowing of reality crashing through superstitions. Like Technobabylon, Shardlight is an odd duck among detective adventures in primarily focusing on world-building, and rather adroitly to boot. The pervasive use of namesake fluorescent uranium glass shards as light sources may not make total hard scientific sense, but it's visually striking and obliquely suggests a post-nuclear hellscape without resorting to Geiger counters. Neither is this a standard postapocalyptic Earth scenario (nuka-cola reference aside) as the war seems to have been more localized, collapse coming from systems failure more than direct destruction. Even where I want to hate some little touch like Amy constantly pulling her hood up or down on scene transitions (such a waste of time, right?) it fits too well with living in a bombed-out slum to criticize. Mass manipulation via hoarding of necessities, class struggle with Napoleonic overtones, an incomplete collapse leaving much technology in place as both plot levers and symbols of inequality or decay, all form one of the best backdrops I've seen in a genre mostly devoted to quirky comic relief and illogical puzzles.

Speaking of which, that expertly crafted world unfortunately does not ring with the most scintillating repartee, nor tease the brain all that enticingly. Characters mostly skew toward the flat or archetypal (I kept expecting Nelson to grate "stay awhile, and listen") and puzzles toward non-sequiturs. Usually you're giving random objects to random NPCs who spontaneously provide you with your next MacGyver utensil. (Thanks for the massively life-saving gift, here's this random bit of string I found in my pocket. Riiiiight.) (Or the gossips.) The more complex can be outright obtuse, like the calligraphy nonsense at the start, or the much later requirement to backtrack a screen to grab a fallen object you didn't even know existed. In fact, for all the authors' talent in shaping a fantastic yet believable society, they frustratingly, repeatedy fail in conveying hints and cues to the audience or building emotional impact within scenes. (Boy, ain't that the way with SciFi writers?)

Luckily the music and decor picks up some of the slack. I am hardly immune to melancholic piano/guitar twanging, and some of the tracks recall STALKER's famous fireside interludes. There are a couple of weird, random digressions, like a vision quest or a back-of-taxi childbirth which looks like some aborted female empowerment morality play, and we spend a couple of repetitive exchanges praising a female leader, but overall Shardlight is less "wokey" than even Technobabylon, which itself was not too horrible in the context of our past decades' insanity. And while it's a bit blandly conveyed, the basic plot is in fact quite interesting. The uniforms are enough of a hint that revolutionaries aren't necessarily the absolute good, and the plot consciously doubles back against the usual fall into mystical nonsense by reinstating sanity after the (still gratuitous) vision quest.

 

For a cherry on top, the ending resulting from my Chaotic Neutral disdain for both sides of a revolution is designated Free Will.

 

Well, now I suppose since it shares most of the same voices, I may as well go for the full stereophonic experience of hitting Lamplight City soon.