![]() Max in Telltale’s Sam & Max games is a good example of this, as he is the game’s hint system and you can tweak in the menus how often, quickly or bluntly he’ll spontaneously offer help if the game thinks you’re stuck, while also being there for you to directly talk to in order to get hints. Having a second character for the player is hardly a new device, but usually they’re either a fully playable character you can switch to, or a back-up and assistant of sorts. It’s like there’s an intermediary stage in your direct control of the character, someone jumping in to do things on Miles’ behalf. This isn’t helped by Bill being unseen on screen but seemingly omniscient, as Miles doesn’t have to go anywhere near anything for Bill to see it. It makes Miles feel a bit useless, like he’s unable to do detective work on his own (which admittedly is sort of a plot point), and distances the player from him a bit. Bill provides most of the response to the player’s actions – choose to look at an object in the environment and it’s Bill, not Miles, who will remark about it. There’s a fine line between charmingly smart-arse and unbearably smarmy (trust me, I know) and he often doesn’t stay on the right side of it. The second issue is that Lamplight City’s ghost, Bill Leger, is pretty damn annoying. Of all the possible concepts for adventure games out there, to end up with something so similar is questionable. They’re not doing anything wrong, but… come on. I’m not saying that because Blackwell did it no-one else can ever do their own take on the Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased model, especially as the Blackwell series has finished, but I don’t know, it’d be a bit like if Sierra had done comedy pirates in the ’90s. Ok, there are several differences when you examine them close up, but the broad concepts, the elevator pitches are pretty similar and that’s an… interesting choice in a field that’s as relatively small and close-knit as the indie adventure game genre (WadjetEye worked with Gonzalez on his previous games, pretty much every voice actor in Lamplight has also worked on WadjetEye games, etc). First is that a detective plagued by a spirit driving and helping them to solve cases is pretty close to the premise of WadjetEye’s Blackwell series. Oh and the spirit of his dead partner is haunting him. The game sees you playing as former police detective Miles Fordham, now reduced to being a private detective after accidentally killing his partner on a routine burglary investigation. The result is a bit disappointing though. ![]() It was described as a detective game set in an alternate history USA with steampunk elements, where your actions across half a dozen separate cases would affect the final outcome of the game. I really did love Shardlight though, so I had high hopes and expectations for Lamplight City as soon as I heard about it. Lamplight City is the latest game by Francisco Gonzalez, developer of Shardlight, (which I loved), A Golden Wake (which I’ve not played) and the Ben Jordan series (which I can never play, because it shares its name with one of my best friends and that’s just too weird for me).
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