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Indie Game of the Week 04: Shardlight

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I've been following Wadjet Eye Games for a while now (though I still haven't gone back and completed Gemini Rue, to my chagrin) who over the years have presented a series of adventure games that offer a traditional take on the genre with some solid puzzles and an equally strong story. "Traditional" in this case also includes the presentation values, which remain firmly fixed in the 20th century for what I would quickly believe is both for deliberate aesthetic as well as financial reasons. This works for me, because I've never felt adventure games never needed much in the way of artistic pizzazz and instead lived and died on their stories and how well they were told. Hell, there are Interactive Fiction purists out there who will tell you that you need nothing more a blinking text parser and your own imagination. You just have to sit there and imagine why you can't get ye flask.

Unfortunately, 2016's Shardlight doesn't quite stack up to previous WEG adventure games I've played of late, such as Resonance, Primordia or Technobabylon. It features Amy Wellard, a young mechanic living twenty years after the apocalypse - or, in a telling bit of ambiguity, the apocalypse of her specific country of Australia, though even that isn't made entirely explicit - who has contracted the deadly Green Lung plague that has been quickly finishing off the few survivors that survived the bombs. To obtain a cure, she works as a "lottery worker": infected folk who take on potentially deadly jobs, often involving the perilous wastelands or other Green Lung sufferers, in order to be entered into a lottery for what we're told is a limited amount of vaccine. The rich, meanwhile, take it easy in less-damaged areas of the cities and have all the healthcare they could need. It's a rum state of affairs, and in protecting herself and her immediate friends, Amy finds herself drawn into a battle against the ruling Aristocracy - all dressed like 17th century American Minutemen, for whatever reason - and the well-being of an ailing country on the brink of total annihilation.

Amy's Green Lung attacks can arrive at dramatically inopportune times. Well, until they suddenly don't.
Amy's Green Lung attacks can arrive at dramatically inopportune times. Well, until they suddenly don't.

The main issue with the game is that it doesn't really take any chances, nothing like the wealth of imaginative puzzles or character-switching shenanigans of WEG's previous games. The plot moves at a pace, and the puzzles are simple enough that you're unlikely to stay stuck for too long. It does that appreciated thing most modern adventure games do where they limit how much of the world is available at any one time, often reducing the world map to the handful of currently relevant locations as well as intermittently conceiving of scenarios where Amy has all her items confiscated for the sake of removing inventory clutter. It's all a little inelegant though, especially compared to the compact "scenarios" of Technobabylon, where you're not allowed to leave a smallish area until that scenario's objectives have all been completed. Shardlight is definitely more focused on its linear storytelling than attempting anything more inventive, and it both works for and against it: I enjoy a briskly-paced adventure game because a story is better delivered when you have less chance of hitting a brick wall for hours as you pixel-hunt your way around a particularly pernicious puzzle, but then I also come to the adventure game genre for the puzzles. I like to be challenged, and be forced to come up with resourceful solutions to problems. Having half those puzzles be "something's high up, so shoot it with your crossbow" gets old fast, and an awful lot of the other puzzles tend to involve smashing things or exhausting NPC dialogue. There's a clever calligraphy puzzle (though a little vague also) and one where you rub a plaque to collect a passcode that occur very early on, but the game doesn't present anything like that level of ingenuity for pretty much the rest of the game.

Most disappointing is the ending, which I won't get into detail here but essentially involves a choice to be made. The game hasn't done choices up until this moment, even though there are ample opportunities for a player to choose how ruthless or compassionate they want their particular Amy to be. Rather, you simply complete every situation the singular way it's supposed to be completed right up until the end. That, plus some 11th-hour random incongruous character development, renders this final choice as a very weak conclusion to the story.

Of course
Of course "0451" is the default passcode. I'm surprised there isn't a Dopefish sticker next to it.

I think Shardlight's OK in the larger pantheon of Indie throwback adventure games but it feels like a step back for WEG productions in particular. (I should state here that WEG are often third-party publishers for other adventure game developers, as was the case here, so there's reason to expect too much in the way of consistency. However, they do still hand-select the projects they want to work on.) It wasn't a total loss, but I'd perhaps suggest you play those aforementioned WEG creations first - that would be Primordia, Resonance, Technobabylon and Gemini Rue - before moving onto this one. Chances are if you've played all four of those already, you're a fan of what these guys are doing and have plans to play (or have played) Shardlight regardless.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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