Lamplight City

"It's a dead end, I'm burning
Disillusion beats the yearning
Could be deaf or just not listening
Would you see a difference anyway?"

 

Solar Fake - This Generation Ends

 

 

Welcome to Lamplight City, major port of "Vespuccia" in 1844. Meet Miles and Bill. Don't get too attached to Bill. He'll do it for you. Long story short, this one of those times I'd like to give an "A" for effort, but can't really bring myself to overlook the project's more amateurish aspects.

 

I was pleasantly surprised at both the general tone and the pacing, which addressed one of my common complaints about detective stories and other subgenres concerning professionals in uncommon occupations: they tend to be the pirates who don't do anything. As soon as their occupation's introduced, the story suddenly and permanently fixates on the lead's personal drama, around which all occurrences mysteriously gravitate. The Blackwell series (whose ghost sidekick deliberately invites a direct comparison) largely fell into that trap. Lamplight elegantly avoids it, and like both Technobabylon and its closer relative Shardlight, serves as an interesting lesson on worldbuilding within the constraints of a linear adventure game. After the prologue/tutorial you go through a series of five cases, all except the last registering as different enough to stay fresh.

 

From a practical angle, it notably does away with a couple of long-standing genre conventions. First off: you only pick up two or three pieces of material evidence every case, and they're not hidden objects but logical parts of the decor. Well, I always hated pixel-hunting, so not too broken up about that one. I'm more ambivalent about the lack of combining items in your inventory, which could be nonsensical "rubber ducky" grade puzzling, sure, but often required you to think about logical interactions. In Lamplight, you're left with dialoguing as a means of plot advancement, and the dialogues are fairly simple. The few detectiving pitfalls can be summed up as "don't be mean" and more often than not you're left doing the rounds of every NPC after picking up a new clue to see if it's spontaneously opened new dialogue lines.

 

Then there's the subject matter itself.

 

Gonzalez is obviously a major fan of 19th century writing - more Poe tidbits than you can shake a premature burial at - and even I couldn't keep track of the endless stream of title drops, historical puns and casual references. But he does a lackluster job on the period jargon (presumably to save players the trouble of Wikipedia trips for every detail) and the voice acting sounds weirdly hit-or-miss. It's blatantly single-take stuff, the leads sound bland (despite your sidekick's often strained attempts at humor) and while some bit players are spot-on (like Solomon the stiff-necked Jewish tailor) others are painfully identifiable as voices far outside their gamut doing Donald Duck impressions - unsurprising given how many of them pulled quintuple and septuple duty.

 

It... almost works. Almost. The wealth of characters does a good job of immersing you in a steampunk setting rather decently authentic, with period-appropriate drug, invention and fad topics. Supernatural elements thankfully do not take over the plot, with even your central haunting being left up in the air as probably psychological in nature. But some inventions (e.g. "ferroduplicator") serve as too obvious plot crutches, and telling us Bill dies right in the game store page blurb negates much emotional impact, even if it is in the prologue. Also, the otherwise painstaking world-building is hampered by the author's desperate push for multiculturalism. Not sure where in Vespuccia New Bretagne might be located, but its more authentic accents sound more apt to Noo Yawk or Noo Joyzee, not N'rleans as its name and voodoo would indicate. You didn't need every minority in there for the sake of representation.

Which brings us to the usual problem of political correctness. Less pronounced than elsewhere (at least Lamplight doesn't come out swinging like Technobabylon) and most cases manage to dodge it, but the guiltless salt-of-the-earth slum trash begin to grate after a while. The unquestioning mass acceptance of subjects like homosexuality which could not even be discussed in 19th-century "Vespuccia" ruins the attempted period setting. Then, sadly, the whole thing faceplants its grand finale into a trite, gratuitous, bland repetition of the "man bad, woman good" mantra. Because of course. Why should this work of fiction not kowtow to every single other crime plot?

 

Pity. Could've been great.

 

In one aspect though Lamplight City still outshines its competitors: its handling of red herrings. The wealth of flavor texts frequently foreshadow developments in your current or future cases, if you're quick enough to catch them. I'd guess with the state of public education being what it's been this past generation, players' ability to spot those tie-ins varies to both extremes. Twitter addict Taylor Swift fans might get blindsided. Jonathan Swift fans not so much. If you're a 19th century fiction fan and pay attention to flavor text, it might actually come across as too easy. I guessed #2's perpetrator before she's introduced from one classical mention, #3's main theme from the first mention of the victim's characteristics, and #4's BEFORE the sister even knocked on the door, from the inter-chapter cutscene, simply based on the sort of thing my sort of people would stick in my sort of story... and I was right! But the main themes each time around are not necessarily the solution to the case. Multiple leads run a satisfying gamut of rapidly debunked, plausible yet unsupported, and gradually revealed truth.

 

Period research, naturalistic explanations, rational sifting through plausible leads, a halfway reasonable treatment of technological progress vs. humanism. Yup. Could've been great.