Shardlight

Wadjet Eye continues their run of solid point and click adventures with their latest, Shardlight. This may be their best looking and best sounding game yet. You play as Amy Wellard, a member of a lower caste in a city recovering from a nuclear-scale bombing. On top of the misery of scavenging for food and dealing with the iron rule of “The Aristocracy,” you also have caught a case of the green lung for which vaccinations are in short supply. The plot is pretty linear and avoids that open, branching middle that adventure game devs of yore seemed to love. Really, we are just here for the story anyways and, at times, even puzzles get in the way of that.

The puzzles are fair and only a couple really require a little deeper analytical thought. I was only stumped once and I feel so stupid for missing the solution (hint: paper is far more rigid in the post-apocalyptic future). The focus here is dialogue, storytelling and characters. Unlike Technobabylon, conversations are concise and to the point and I was not clicking past the voice acting as much as I am wont to do. I almost would consider this Wadjet Eye’s best game but there are a couple of weird choices near the end of the game that kind of spoiled the immersion and narrative for me. It made the ending somewhat unsatisfying, but all-in-all the game up until those final moments is stellar.