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