Shardlight dev's steampunk-y adventure Lamplight City still looks neat
Click on these crimes
A new calendar year means games which seemed impossibly far away are now really quite close. Here comes Lamplight City, the next adventure game from the creator of A Golden Wake and Shardlight, flexing and doing some warm-up marketing stretches with a new trailer ahead of its launch in a few months. After tripping through the roaring '30s then our dystopian future, Francisco Gonzalez is off to the steampunk-y 19th century in Lamplight City, where we'll play as a private investigator solving cases while hunting for his former partner's murderer. I do like solving crimes and it sounds like this will offer a fair bit of freedom in how we approach them. Here, watch:
Crimes! There are five of them to solve, each with several suspects, false leads, and multiple potential outcomes. Marketing blurb promises that we'll get a degree of freedom in how we handle the cases and suspects, which sounds promising. I certainly welcome more solve 'em ups adventure games which give us space to make mistakes and try different approaches.
Lamplight City is due later this year, some time from April to the end of June. Its Steam page is already up, if you do that wishlisting thing.
Though Gonzalez made Shardlight as part of Wadjet Eye Games, the adventure games studio which also published his A Golden Wake and was once going to publish this too, they've since parted ways. Gonzalez explained last year that "a series of unfortunate circumstances meant I wasn't affordable anymore, and so I had to be let go." So he's making this under his own Grundislav Games, and Application Systems Heidelberg will publish it.
While our resident clickhead John wasn't too fond of A Golden Wake, he did like a lot about Shardlight. Fingers crossed the improvement continues with Lamplight City.