I enjoy bad games, which is good because I play a lot of them. But even if I didn’t, playing a thousand terrible indies would be completely worth it to me just to find one this brilliant.
Lamplight City is a 2018 alt-history steampunk detective story told across five interconnected cases. It made by Francisco Gonzalez, who has worked with Wadjet Eye (largely as a voice actor) and even published with them in the past, which I didn’t realize going in, as he’s now publishing under his own studio name, Grundislav Games. Truthfully I was just excited for this game because I like steampunk and mysteries and the whole Aesthetic seemed like my jam — I was hoping to like it, but didn’t think it would be as brilliant as it was.
There are a lot of reasons I tend to play through develeoper and genre catalogues in order, one of them being that I have a deep-seated psychological need for things to be in a proper sequence. I assume everyone shares this and it is in no way strange or offputting. But the other, more tangible reason is that art builds on itself. You can’t learn physics before you learn algebra, and you can’t really know a text until you know the texts that came before it, especially when those texts are closely related.
Unsurprisingly for someone who’s worked with Wadjet Eye, this game is clearly influenced by the Blackwell series, but more important, it is also clearly responding to the Gabriel Knight: Black People Are Dangerous game. I wouldn’t even call it a rewriting or critique of that game — it was a complete evisceration. It was honestly one of the most satisfying critiques I’ve ever read, a resounding declaration that no, voudou is not evil, no black people who practice it do not deserve to die, and actually, rich white people were the ones brutalizing black people with impunity and not the other way around. I found it so cathartic. And that was just the first case, lol.
The game takes place in an alt-history 1840s, where the US seems to have lost the Revolutionary War and been split up into various regions. You play as Miles Fordham, who lives in an Italian-influenced mid-Atlantic region called Vespuccia, in the port city of New Bretagne (Seems like it might be the Carolinas? I’m too lazy to lay the map over a real map). During a mundane burglary investigation, Miles’ partner Bill falls from a roof and dies and the perp gets free. The police blame Miles for ‘getting his partner killed’ and the bullying drives him to quit and start working as a PI. Meanwhile, he begins to hear Bill’s voice in his head at all times, with strong sedatives being the only thing that give him peace. As his life unravels and his possibly-ghost partner refuses to leave him alone, he tries to keep taking on investigations.
The story is deeply concerned with questions of institutional power — Miles’ wife is black, and we’re constantly reminded that in antebellum not!US, an interracial marriage is taboo and black people can’t vote and struggle to make ends meet. The game strongly ties together questions of race with gender and class, and makes a point of showing that Miles is better able to help the downtrodden as a PI than he was as a cop. It’s heavily implied (if not outright stated) that his political views had made him a pariah in the department, and that only thing keeping him his job was that he had an incredible record of solving cases. Bill’s death seems to have been the thing that allowed his coworkers to finally completely push him out, and in his absence his corrupt colleagues are promoted. You definitely get the sense that the other policemen are ghoulishly happy they can say he killed his partner, that nothing you could ever say or do could change that, and I appreciate that the game doesn’t try to reason with them. The organization is corrupt and unsalvageable and Miles is both personally better off without them, as well as more capable of professionally helping people working around them. I think it’s significant too that the only people at the precinct sympathetic to Miles are the coroner, who is a POC and also very isolated from the cops, and the administrator, a woman who ends up fired by the shitty chief. The whole game is set against the backdrop of a tense election where the candidates are Atwood, a wealthy establishment politician who promises to fund Big Tech and you can discover spoofing votes, and McAvoy, a worker’s rights campaigner who runs on job security and improved infrastructure.
I don’t want to say too much else because I don’t want to give away the premise of the lategame cases, but the way institutional violence translates into real, physical violence is a major theme.
Spoiler below is major, seriously, play the game first.
I think one interesting thing the game does is show sympathy for political violence while also wondering about who it really punishes. There’s a plotline about steampunk tech taking jobs from workers and a guerilla group who is bombing factories as a form of protest. But what the game points out is that this doesn’t actually help anyone — the people who are most hurt are the foreman who has to clean up the mess and the ironworkers who are now out of a job. The rich don’t care. Similarly, at the end, I really liked that you can have Miles say, “Look, I sympathize with your motivations and maybe even your actions, but you’ve already gotten one innocent person killed and there’s inevitably going to be more, and that’s not justifiable.” What the Justice Killer is doing may feel vindicating in the moment, but it does nothing to actually solve the problem, and the collateral damage it causes isn’t okay.
Instead, I think the game posits community as resistance — something many thinkers and activists have been arguing for a long time. Miles’ decision to continue working outside the system while hiring the displaced Upton and his wife is fundamentally a move to create a community that handles its own problems in a nonviolent and local way (see also: Frog Detective 3, the best parable about anti-incarceration movements I’ve ever seen). The cops’ failure to get to germaine details of people’s personal lives, and Miles’ willingness to do favors and solve small problems for information, exist in a stark contrast. Consider also the madame’s point about the community among the women in sex work. I also think the way you helping people keeps coming back is significant — if you’re kind to Amelie and save her from the Duprees, her brother later talks to you, etc. The theme of trust in a marriage versus Miles trying to handle his trauma without Addie is a piece of this as well — Miles is a better person and detective (and husband, obviously) when he is willing to share himself with her.
It reminds me a lot of that sequence in Into the Woods where Jack says he’s going to murder the steward who killed his mother and the Baker says, no, you can’t, and Jack is like well wtf am I supposed to do to make this right and the Baker just goes, “I don’t know, but more murder isn’t going to help,” and then they realize they have to support each other and stop being dicks. There’s a reason a story that is very much about stopping cycles of abuse culminates a song called “No One Is Alone.” And no I will not be taking questions on comparing this to Into the Woods.
Anyway I really like this as a counterpoint. I think sometimes even when texts can make really good institutional critique they can sometimes end up just kind of shrugging and leaving the question of, “Okay, but what should we do?” hanging. I think a worse game would have ended with the only option from Miles being, “You just shouldn’t kill people! Because it’s wrong!” without the sympathetic angle because you can only show that sympathy if there’s an alternative. Instead it makes a much similar move to Into the Woods, saying it’s complicated to not just perpetuate violence and we have to work at it but it’s necessary.
I also really loved this as a story about survivor’s guilt, substance abuse, and depression.
The use of a haunting as a metaphor for PTSD and guilt and trauma is one of my favorite things and when it’s done well like it is here it just slams me right in the gut. It reminded me so much of Haunting of Bly Manor. I don’t think there ever was a ghost; I think “Bill’s voice” is a metaphor, a way the game explains to us what it’s like to lose someone and have that pain stay with you morning, noon, and night. I think it was Miles’ guilt over not just the death but his failure to follow up on it. I don’t think a lick of it was supernatural and that’s what was so perfect. I really loved the choice to parallel the story with this subplot of psychic fraud and these cases where you have to prove supernatural things false, it’s like the game turning to you and saying, “The same way this fulfills a need for these other characters, the idea of ‘being haunted’ fulfills a need for Miles.”
I think this is one of the more meaningful and sensitive portrayals of substance abuse as a coping mechanism I’ve ever seen, certainly in games but also in media at large (though as above, all of Flanagan’s works have themes of alcoholism). I just loved it. I really loved it.
The art in this game was beautiful, a very painterly pixel style that at times hovered between traditional pixel art and something more impressionistic.
The sound design was… fine. If you like your games to be voice acted you’ll probably be fine with it, but it’s not Supergiant, and I didn’t feel a need to play with the sound on.
Gameplay wise, this was a rather complex AGS game — I didn’t realize it was AGS until I went into the save files to back one up and noticed the ‘agssave’ in the filename. This is partly because of how impressively it manages to feel like an investigation — I tend to associate AGS with the more ‘puzzle’ gameplay where you find and use items, but there’s no inventory here, just a journal with clues and documents — for the most part, you’re solving things by paying attention to what people say to you and figuring out where to go next.
I will say the one big problem is that there’s no autosave. I really really wish the game saved, say, whenever you went to the map. The thing is, the game is really focused on the way you interact with characters, and this means that you can make mistakes, say the wrong thing, and fuck up the case by pissing people off… which is great, I love it. BUT if you want to see everything, especially if you want to do it on one playthrough, not being able to reload can be a real killer. I liked stumbling into dead ends and making mistakes, but I disliked not being able to easily go back and pursue different choices. I actually think the game maybe would have been better served by a VN-style bad ending when you mess up, returning you to the prior decision point, but an intermittent autosave — even like, every 15 minutes — would have worked as well. To me, part of the appeal of this type of game is poking and prodding it, seeing what happens if I do the stupid thing and then seeing what happens if I don’t, and while you CAN do this here, you have to be constantly manually saving, which is a definite downer. And if you’re a dipshit like me you constantly forget to even after you’ve realized you should and it causes issues. edit: Dev responded on Steam and said there should have been on-map autosaves, not sure what went wrong for me but I’m playing either on Linux or a custom PC, so I assume this was my own fault somehow.
But honestly, I really loved this. It’s up there next to Seance at Blake Manor as not just a standout among the detective games, but among games period, and it’s definitely a general rec.
There should be more steampunk detective games, preferably also with ghosts and detectives, please appeal to me directly from now on devs thank you.