Where once poorer games would require you click everything on everything, more recently you click one thing in the only place it could go. This is a modern curse of point-n-clickers, where the inventory puzzle has been reduced to putting the triangle-shaped object into the triangle-shaped hole, reducing any point in their existing in the first place. (Dropsy, I'm looking at you.) Shardlight gets this just right, with three or four places immediately available, each of them packed with people to talk to, alleyways to explore, objects to find and use, etc, and then rapidly adds new areas just when you're ready to move on. Obviously it's just an escape-the-room if it's linear, but too often adventures give players an agoraphobic paralysis by giving them far too many involved places to go and not nearly enough direction. It's a fine art, getting the balance of locations correct. I think this is best represented as a checklist of what these games normally screw up, and why Shardlight - in its first third at least - does not: It's a tale of conspiracy, underground rebellions, and torn loyalties.įrom this point on, Shardlight keeps getting things right. Down there Amy finds a dying man who gives her a sealed letter, telling her if she delivers it then everything in her life will change. The game begins as you descend into a dingy under-street series of tunnels, tasked with fixing a reactor that generates electricity for the upper classes. Lottery jobs are the kind of shitty tasks that no one wants to do. You play Amy Wellard, a mechanic who is forced to take on "lottery jobs" to be in with a chance of winning vaccine from the government to treat a wildly spreading plague that's infected her. This is a post-bombs-falling world, in which an authoritarian and oligarchical governance called the Aristocrats has risen to take advantage of the chaos. LOOK AT OUR WORLD AND HOW IT'S DIFFERENT FROM YOURS! NO! LOOK MORE! KEEP ON LOOKING! Shardlight is a really rather splendid example of how to assume the player isn't an idiot, and can pick up on entirely obvious themes without having them screamed. The post-apocalyptic adventure from developer Francisco Gonzalez presents an intriguing story in an immediately embellished and believable post-apocalyptic world.įar too often adventure games (and indeed any games) can spend much too long trying to force its exposition down your neck. While I've only played the first third, it's looking very hopeful we will be able to include Shardlight in that list of successes. The results have been splendid games like Technobabylon, Resonance and Gemini Rue. Dave Gilbert's Wadjet Eye diverged from his self-created Blackwell series to producing adventures made by other individuals or tiny teams. While the world got over-excited at the prospect of old men and women emerging from their dusty tombs to make adventure games again, one indie production company quietly continued putting out the best in the business.
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