This is all the more aggravating, because there are some great surreal scenes about memories and decision-making. Granted, these reflect her constant thinking about which sides to choose, but considering that the story is told in a very linear way, the ending is questionable. Usually one shouldn’t write about the ending in an adventure game to prevent spoilers, but with three different endings that only change depending on a few actions and decisions in the final dialogues, it’s difficult not to be a disappointed that one will have a completely different opinion about the main character, depending on her choices. This was already problematic in a game like Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today, another dystopian story about people in emotional and physical turmoil, although Wadjet Eye Games’ title is more human in tone and has quite a few humorous touches. The former is justified by the whole theme of accepting a dictatorship and living with it, but the latter is often too gory and gratuitous, seen in headshots, pierced bodies, gouged eyes or other mutilations. What it doesn’t lack is the depiction of cruelty and some violent bloodshed. The atmosphere of taking part in a society torn into rich and poor lifestyles, the oppressors and depressed is always tangible, so it’s disappointing that the general storytelling lacks suspenseful and surprising elements despite some very good writing in dialogues and monologues, if one overlooks certain over-dramatic elements that become too common in indie games and Wadjet Eye Games titles in particular. This even goes so far that black humor is found in children songs that could easily be found in a Dystopian novel with their poetic imagery. With a personified Death in the form of a Grim Reaper who visits people near death, a sect who worships him and therefore embraces death with open arms, the sense of place is great. The real stars are the world’s lore and some people’s background stories. Of course Amy soon joins the resistance, although involuntarily at first, so one shouldn’t expect any surprising turns in the plot and character development, especially since Amy isn’t the most fleshed out or interesting character in the Dystopian genre. The picture Wadjet Eye Games draws seems anything but original, although the lottery twist is certainly interesting. Guards are there to protect them from an underground resistance or just from themselves. People struggle for daily survival on the streets with their wares to sell, living in their small communities, while the aristocracy, the ruling class, decides with a lottery who lives and who dies. The world in which Amy lives is depressing, but not without a sense of hope. (USA 2016, developer/publisher: Wadjet Eye Games, platform: PC)Īmy Wellard who does the odd repair job for a aristocratic government that controls the food and vaccines for the working class believes there’s a cure to the disease that decimates the population after the bombs fell. This is the only way for the poor to get vaccinated.īelieving that there is an actual cure for the disease that the government is hiding from the people, Amy sets out to find this cure and she will stop at nothing to find it.Dark dystopian stories in adventure games have become pretty common these days, but Wadjet Eye Games still delivers. She doesn’t come from the wealthy sector of society and is reluctantly working for the government hoping that she could be entered into the vaccine lottery. In Shardlight, you will get to play as a woman named Amy Wellard. They face hunger, disease and death on a daily basis. The poor however are left to fend for themselves. Water, food and vaccine is scarce, only the rich get to have the needed doses of vaccination, in return they must unconditionally support the government. The people left to rule the land controls all the resources and there is no one who dares to go against them. The world ended on that day, as death, hunger, and disease became prevalent. The bombs fell and the world was never the same again. Shardlight is a point-and-click adventure, indie, role-playing video game developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games.
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