She’ll die eventually, but there may be hope as she finds a dying man during a lottery job that promises a way to save her and everyone suffering from the plague. It’s been twenty years since the world changed forever, and Amy has Green Lung, a disease ravaging the remains of the world. The game follows Amy Wellard, the daughter of a fix-it man whom was born into the world as it was blown apart through the onset of nuclear war caused by resource disagreements (of course). Unlike Primordia‘s focus on black humor and existentialism, Shardlight is much more grounded and, well, human. In 2016, Wadjet Eye decided to return to the wastelands with a more human story with Shardlight, and it may be one of the best games in their entire library. Amy is likeable lead, there are some moving scenes, and you meet some fascinating oddballs out there in the wastes, but I never found myself that invested after the first couple of hours.Back in 2012, Wadjet Eye Games and Wormwood Studios released Primordia, a post-apocalypse adventure about machines surviving the world man left behind. Shardlight ultimately pales in comparison and is an average adventure game that’s just about kept afloat by its world and story. Their previous game, the superb Technobabylon, combined smart writing and well-rounded characters with a compelling murder mystery, which is a hard act to follow. Shardlight isn’t one of Wadjet Eye’s best adventures, but it’s not one of its worst either. Amusingly, I listened to the commentary track for this puzzle and the developers even seemed unconvinced that including it was a good idea. The kind of thing you'd expect to find at the end of one of these games. The feeling of beating it was satisfying, but it was a frustrating early stumbling block. One relatively early glyph-based puzzle had me scratching my head for a good 40 minutes, and by the time I solved it my desk was covered in scrawled notes. There are some lighter moments to be found, but mostly the story is as sombre and serious as your bleakly beautiful surroundings. A sense of humour is often what keeps you going in adventures when the puzzles get frustrating and you feel lost, but Shardlight plays it very straight. This is a problem with most old school-style adventure games, of course, but that doesn’t give them a free pass. It’s a far cry from the bleak wasteland of Fallout, and you get the feeling that, in the wake of whichever war took place here, society is beginning to piece itself back together. Amy visits a shanty town market that’s bustling with shoppers and has friendly conversations with people. While the downtrodden masses live in filthy squalor among the debris of civilisation, the Aristocrats-who dress like Civil War generals and wear creepy porcelain masks to protect them from the poison air-live pampered, comfortable lives in palatial homes.īut while a lot of post-apocalypse fiction paints the underclass as struggling, destitute, and desperate, the people in Shardlight’s broken city seem to have made a life for themselves among all the devastation. The de facto rulers of this post-apocalyptic world, the Aristocrats, hire people like her to do their dirty work in exchange for the vaccine that they, conveniently, control. A generator has stopped working and Amy has to climb into a dark, filthy sewer and reactivate it.
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