You’ll take the role of Amy Warden, a late 20s/early 30s woman, who finds herself in a post-apocalyptic world, twenty years after numerous nuclear explosions changed civilization. She’s a survivor, a thinker, and a good mechanic with a strong moral compass, traits that she’ll put to immediate and constant use in her daily life. With the collapse of civilization, a new system has evolved in which the majority of people are impoverished while the select few live like kings, protected by a peace-keeping force. Hunger and disease are a real problem for the poor who scrap together in rudimentary marketplaces and do other odd jobs to get by.
Government sanctioned lottery jobs provide opportunities for people to perform a typically-dangerous job for the government in return for a voucher that grants you access to a vaccine lottery. This vaccine is vital to cure a condition known as Green Lung, a slow-burning yet terminal disease that afflicts those with an overexposure to radiation. That same radiation that gives those broken shards that greenish glow. Worse still is that having Green Lung is basically seen as a punishable crime.
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Shardlight begins with Amy undertaking one of these awful lottery jobs. She’s got to check in on a remote power plant reactor to see why it’s not operating to par, and in doing so she encounters the first of many NPCs. Traditional branching dialog is used to convey character and plot in a meaningful way. The voice-acting is diverse and good, maybe a little overhanded in parts — and I will say pretty annoying in one specific scene (the jump rope one), but the majority of it is great. When you’re not conversing with NPCs you’re scouring the environment for interact-ables, be they objects to pick up and examine or puzzles to solve. It’s all classic point-and-click design and for anyone longing for the days of Lucasarts adventures and the old SCUMM engine, you’ll feel right at home.
The preview build I played showcased a couple dozen “rooms” or areas that Amy visits, from the sterile offices of a hospital to the sandy wasteland of the salt flats. The variety of locations is nice, and as you exit one area you’re taken to a fast travel screen that displays all available other areas that have been revealed in the story so far. I appreciated too that, in key situations, Amy explains why she cannot leave an area before she completes a certain task. This might sound minute, but, anyone that’s been stuck hard in a point-and-click knows the value of not having every option open to you. That’s not to Shardlight did not offer up a sufficient number of options and avenues though, I thought a good balance was achieved in the build I played. For the most part, the puzzles are well designed and logical, if you’re paying attention the pieces fall together almost predictably. You do have to get your pixel-hunt on in some areas, but for the most part the artwork is cleanly presented making distinguishing objects in a scene not only easy but pleasant.
It looks like Shardlight is going to be a strong entry for the genre and it’s releasing in just about three weeks, so keep an eye out for it on Steam and be sure to check out my full review in a month or so.
