Lamplight City. I wanted to love it, there’s a charm to having good, fully voice acted lines in a point and click game. For a time I was reminded of Hobs Barrow (another fully voiced point and click) and how that was excellent at setting the scene and creating a real sense of place. Lamplight City with its alternate Victorian era steampunk America manages to also do so but the main detective story in particular the cases aren’t quite as interesting.
The main setup of your characters inner voice (which I won’t spoil) works well for the genre. This allows for engaging and at times funny dialogue as you click about the environments.
The issue I have is how investigative threads can be dropped by saying or doing the wrong thing which isn’t telegraphed to the player that this is happening which leads to suspects not being allowed to be investigated and frustrated outcomes where you either accuse someone innocent or choosing the option of declaring the case unsolvable. I ended up having to declare one of the cases unsolvable but overall got the main suspect in the end. However it’s possible to mess up and make each case unsolvable and get bad endings which seems like a waste of the players time.
In short I liked the setting, atmosphere and characters but was not fully engaged by the cases and main story unfortunately.