A choose-your-own-adventure-like about running border patrol for a fantasy city where the joy is in the journey and the choices you make along the way.

In Lil Guardsman, you play as a 12-year-old girl working your dad’s shift at the city’s guard shack. You’re basically ye olde immigration officer and you need to decide who to let in, deny, or throw in jail using a bunch of tools to interrogate people. Depending on which tools and interactions you use, and what you decide to do with the people, your outcome will be completely different. Some levels I replayed 4-5 times and was able to see new dialogue every time. My only gripe with the game is that it grades you based on how “well” you performed during these interactions. It’s tricky because the game is built in such a way that encourages experimenting and trying weird stuff to see multiple results, but then it penalizes you if you make the wrong choices which sometimes works against my desire to tell my own wacky tale. The story framing for this is that you are an employee of the city and they’re grading you based on your performance before paying you accordingly. It all makes sense in the scope of the story; I just sometimes wish I had a little more freedom to mess around. Thankfully, there’s always more than one way to get good marks from your employer so it doesn’t ever shove you into a box.

Throughout the story, you’ll make a number of choices that often feel monumental in how you are shaping the lives of the people in the city, only to realize that every ending is, more or less, the same based on a couple of critical choices. Much like almost any “your decision matters” choice-based games like Mass Effect, Life is Strange, the Telltale games, or a number of other titles, you really need to embrace the logic of “it’s about the journey not the destination”. I played this with a group for Book Club For Games and, yes, most of our endings were extremely similar, but every single one of us had totally different choices and experiences along the way, so all of our stories felt different despite our similar endings.

The real star of Lil Guardsman is the writing - ranging from heartfelt to hilarious, while throwing in the occasional commentary and 4th-wall-breaking joke. At its most basic, reduced form, Lil Guardsman is just a choose-your-own-adventure game, but it excels at what it does because of the writing. I cared about the characters and their silly little politics, and often found myself laughing out loud at the jokes. If you’re able to sit back and enjoy the chaotic ride of playing a 12-year-old girl who has way more responsibility than she should, I think you’ll really enjoy Lil Guardsman.

+ Writing is consistently fun, witty, and often quite funny with great characters
+ Fun variety in dialogue that encourages replaying some sections here and there
+ Impressive amount of consideration had to go into every possible choice and bit of dialogue that results from those choices

- Getting judged on your choices sometimes feels antithetical to the spirit of making your own choices
- No mid-level saves means restarting the whole chapter if your game crashes
- Having to replay the second half of the game 4 times to get all the trophies when there’s not that much variety in said endings sucks

Papers, Please meets.....Monkey Island? Lil' Guardsman is a super charming, well written game. It's got some flaws with the gameplay loop that drag it down a bit, but overall, this game is able to get passed those issues without problem.

Some of the decisions you have to make feel incredibly arbitrary. Mixed with the grading system the game features, it can be a lil' head scratching with some of the decisions it wants you to make in order to get a perfect grading.

Luckily the game features a pretty forgiving rewind system so you can replay some of these areas without having to do a full playthrough.

It's relatively short for a single playthrough so the flaws and nitpicks are all manageable. Those things aside, Lil' Guardsman is well worth your time if you're looking for something with a ton of offbeat personality and charm.

Lil' Guardsman is a fun puzzle/adventure game that has wonderful and whimsical artwork which does a grand job at hiding the game's serious nature that it has sometimes!

Your guard shifts let you interact with a variety of characters who present different challenges with the tools given to you as a Guardsman. You can give them truth spray to get informed of their true intentions, a x-ray machine or metal detector to see if they have anything suspicious on them, or you can also use a whip if you'd like! Because why not! These all present different options of ways to achieve a 3 or 4-star rating for that specific guest, which is fun. Sometimes, the way you achieve those 3 or 4 stars is a bit confusing though.

Your character, Lil, is a 12-year old who does have some tough things going on, and some of that stuff gets discovered more as you go through the game which I am glad we got that type of character development as the game progressed.

Overall, Lil Guardsman is a jolly time and not too long! Not perfect in some ways, but still a fun time!

I think my 2/5 score is in part because of me, what I hoped this would be, and how I play games. I wanted this to be more of a "Papers, Please" type experience, with decisions and determinations that lead to self-reflection. The admittedly charming story that I replaced that self-reflection was not, for me, a satisfying alternative.

I think my issue with what the game ACTUALLY is lies with the scoring system after each case. It presents itself as the government's evaluation of you (which, based on the above paragraph, is clearly up my alley, given how corrupt that government seems to be), but getting full points often required me to do things that stretch my suspension of disbelief thin.

Why, for example, does the government want me to confiscate a can of paint from a man THEY hired? It didn't even matter which can I took, as far as the points were concerned. Whether I'm right or wrong, it feels more like scoring highly involves doing what the developers, rather than the government, wanted of me.

In most other games, I'd be perfectly fine with that! However, in the context of a "choose your own adventure" type game like this, it feels simply incongruous.

This game was pretty fun. I enjoyed the art style and voice acting, they stood out well. A majority of the characters were interesting and entertaining, with challenges not being too difficult gameplay wise. Some tools were more useful than others, same with the phone lifelines. It felt like each person could be a Scooby-Doo villain, waiting to be unmasked. Played through the game in full twice, choosing different suitors and various other options.

Minor gripes:
-Save mechanic is done by day, which is annoying to replay a specific person or scene. Going back also makes you lose existing progress.
-It makes you feel like you have more impact than you actually do. There are 4 different “ending variants”, but a lot of railroading to major plot points
-Moving outside of the guard shed is annoying and not very responsive. It isn’t the core of the gameplay, but some of the pathing is clunky/unintuitive