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At age four, future video game designer Roberta Williams saw the 1959 film Horrors of the Black Museum, a movie about a frustrated writer who hypnotizes his assistant and makes him torture people to provide inspiration for his books. The film was released by Anglo-Amalgamated, the producers of Circus of Horrors and Peeping Tom, films so violent that critic David Pirie termed them a “Sadian trilogy” (after the Marquis de Sade, French nobleman, philosopher, and writer whose name gave us the term “sadism”).  The movie scared Williams away from the horror genre for a time, but as a teen she ventured back, soaking in movies like Carrie and Halloween.

In 1995, Williams added her own title to the universe of horror: Phantasmagoria. The game was a point and click adventure horror game released for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and the Sega Saturn. The game was developed and published by Sierra On-Line, the company responsible for classic adventure games like King’s Quest and the Leisure Suit Larry series.

In the game, players controlled Adrienne Delaney, a mystery novelist. She had recently moved with her husband to a mansion, previously owned by magician Zoltan “Carno” Carnovasch. This simple premise set the scene for a story of murder, possession, and (perhaps most disturbingly) a rape.

The rape scene made the game particularly controversial, leading some companies to refuse to stock the game after its release. Parents, religious groups and more condemned the scene and one publication went so far as to say that the Phantasmagoria “makes a game of sexual violence.” The game could not be sold at all in Australia after the Office of Film and Literature Classification refused to give it a rating. For her part, Williams defended the game pointing at the games like Doom and others were far more violent, and in those games the protagonist was the perpetrator of the violence. Williams also argued that the scene was essential to advancing the plot, which involved the main character’s husband becoming possessed by the spirit of Carno.

The game was Sadian beyond the rape scene. Its cinematic graphics emphasized the realism of the game’s violence. Special effects helped create graphic and disturbing scenes like a head being split in half by a pendulum blade and a head being burned. These effects were achieved using replicas of the actors’ heads, pumps full of fake blood, a network of strings that allowed them to pull the fake head apart, and other prosthetics that emphasized the grizzly nature of the injuries.

None of this controversy diminished the success of the game (it arguably increased interest). The game won several awards, earned $12 million dollars its opening weekend, helped raise Sierra’s stock prices, and spawned a sequel titled Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh.  

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Sadly, the museum was never completed. To make matters worse, a pair of high school students unleashed evil spirits (known as the ixupi), which consumed them and the professor. It is your job to capture the ixupi and liberate the spirits of Windlenot and the teens. You do this by finding the urns meant to hold the malevolent spirits. There are ten in total.

This, in a nutshell, was the game Shivers, released by Sierra On-Line in 1995 for Windows and Mac. The game has drawn numerous comparisons to 1993’s Myst. It was an adventure game that operated from a first person view. However, unlike Myst, you had a life meter. The ixupi could chip away at your health as the game went on.  

Gameplay involved exploring the museum while solving a variety of puzzles. The game maintains a creepy ambiance throughout, amplified by the game’s soundtrack. As you play, you can read the descriptions of the museum’s bizarre collection (though you had to avoid the ixupi as you did so). Once you complete the game’s main mission, you could continue exploring the museum.

The game was designed by Marcia Bales, who had a passion for both travel and archaeology. Her initial game concept involved travelling the world to collect the spirits. The idea of placing the game in a set location came from Roberta Williams (designer of the game Phantasmagoria). The concept for the ixupi came from Bales knowledge of South American cultures, while incorporating aspects of Egyptian mythology and a variety of other folklore and legends.

Willie Eide, who worked as the game’s lead developer, was responsible for the game’s inclusion of closed captions. According to Eide, “I come from a deaf family. My parents are deaf and a couple of my brothers are deaf so having deaf individuals or hard-of-hearing individuals play our game is very important to me. So we really tried to make sure that the hard-of-hearing person, although he will miss the cool stereo ambient sounds that we have in each of the rooms, will at least be able to play the game and all the puzzles.”

There were a few bugs in the gameplay that could make it frustrating. Your character could only carry one item at a time. You also had to repeat some of the puzzles as you traveled through the museum. That said, the graphics and ambiance were enough to keep it engaging.

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With the gameplay of Sierra point and click adventures and retro style pixel graphics, the game goes for your nostalgia from the get-go. The narrative drops the player right into the action of the 1800s style setting while easing them into dialogue exchanges, which is the main gameplay element of the title. These sequences may remind some of the modern titles such as the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series or the interrogation sequences from L.A. Noir. Along with interrogations, finding collectibles and solving puzzles reminiscent of the classics such as Maniac Mansion or Myst round out the gameplay elements of the title.

With many throwbacks to the classic PC narrative-heavy game, Lamplight City promises to please at least those with a hunger for the retro PC charm.

When a police stakeout goes awry in the steampunk retro-future city of New Bretagne, the two detectives Miles Fordham and Bill Leger are confronted with a shadowy figure on a rooftop after investigating a crime. After a decision that changes their lives, Miles sets off on his own with Bill’s intuition to guide him on his independent investigations across the city. Juggling a faltering marriage, substance abuse, supernatural interference and sneaking around former colleagues in the Police force, Miles Fordham is a well-made character who is fleshed out well during the game. The dynamic between himself, Bill and his Wife are especially of note in the story due to world-building elements within it that add to the overall immersion of the game.

The controls are solid with ways to speed up sections you have played through before which serves as a nice modern touch. The voice acting is also top-notch, as it never feels like a chore to listen to any of the dialogue of Lamplight City. The talent is immersive and while at times camp it never breaks the air of the atmosphere and overall aesthetic of the game. The graphics and presentation also offer a great retro feel to the experience which will make players of old-school 90’s PC titles grin with the moments that feel authentic.

Unfortunately, Lamplight City suffers from a number of flaws that keep it from truly shining.

Great voice acting and aesthetic is undermined by poor writing, egregious snarky commentary, and gameplay that feels very disengaged and dated. While a good character in his own right, the situations that surround Miles never seem of any gravity greater than his own which prevents any true immersion into the world around him. The game may lend itself to multiple playthroughs due to being able to “fail” cases, but one would never know unless they were to read promotional material for the game because it is never touched on in any way in-game.

The Good: The overall presentation is great. The characters feel lively, with their own unique quirks and personalities. The voice acting brings life to every denizen of the steampunk world and pushes the conversations front and center, making puzzle-solving and finding new dialogue options fun. The retro pixel graphics with Fallout 2 style “talking heads” offers a great feeling of being in the same room as the two people talking in the game.

The Bad: Shoehorned story elements, boring mysteries, and gameplay that feels dated all serve to weigh down the game. The overall experience is quickly sullied by the feeling of poor design choices, slow pacing and interesting story hooks that are never truly resolved. This makes the good parts of the game feel cheapened, as only fans of this genre will be enticed to play for long periods of time.

Final Thoughts:

With a great premise, aesthetic, and fun characters, Lamplight City is a game clearly made for the retro PC gamer. Fantastic voice acting, puzzles and a solid lead character, unfortunately, do little to remove the effect of lackluster case stories, boring gameplay, and a half-baked narrative. Many ideas feel as though they were not completely fleshed out and the attempts to make the city of New Bretagne seem alive and cohesive fall flat when the cases Miles Fordham takes on seem so much more important than anything or anyone else in the game. While it makes a fantastic first impression, Grundislav Games may want to take a bit more time when looking back at the problems with Lamplight City.

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