Blade Runner introduced us to Rick Deckard,
the futuristic twin of film noir's jaded detective.
Two years later, the cyberpunk movement took flight with William Gibson's
seminal book Neuromancer, which featured a heist gone wrong.
Ever since, riffs on film, noir and crime
seem to go hand in hand with the cyberpunk genre.
Lacuna is one of the many games which uses the archetype of the cyberpunk
detective, a genre which includes the ill fated cyber punk 2077
and of course, the notable 1997 Blade Runner video game
where many games fall over is in the crime aspects of the investigation.
Too often there's a magical detection device which scans the room for you.
These spidey senses are an overused feature of modern gaming
and takes away some of the experience of actually being a detective
when the clues are essentially handed to you through X-ray vision.
Thankfully, Lacuna is not that game.
I haven't felt more like a detective than when playing the 2021 indie game
Lacuna from Digital's Interactive because the puzzles force you
to come up with challenging but logical conclusions.
The game is not a long game,
but not taking your time and investigations early can have
a detrimental domino effect on the rest of the game.
I spend a lot of Lacuna puzzling through the problems in my notebook
before I even dared to lock in my conclusions.
But boy, was it satisfying when I got them right.
While Lacuna promises a sci fi noir game, it's reluctant to use the title
Cyberpunk Killer, even though I do
think it tucks into that film noir side of cyberpunk very well.
It opens on drove you while playing a young girl named Meera.
For me, the opening was the weakest part of the game.
I'd been sold a detective game, and here I was, playing
a little kid, doing what was essentially a tutorial level.
While you get through it fairly quickly, it took me back, given my expectations.
I wondered if this would have been better as a media item or news broadcast
during the game.
However, it's really worth paying attention to the information
given here about the planets and the local civil religion.
I found myself late in the game trying to remember which planet was which
and who did what.
And because it is quite a complex plot for such a short game,
it's worth paying attention here given the complexity of the story.
I found it really helpful to take notes as I played
after the brief Prolog on trivia, you find yourself playing Neil Conrad,
a classic hardboiled agent for the city I divorce dated
with life and putting his job before his relationship with his daughter.
While it's a bit of a cliche, I didn't mind it here because I quite
liked the way the relationship was played between Katherine and Conrad.
With the assassination of Dravid's, Foreign Minister Conrad Moss
tracked down the killer, which leads him to uncover a planet
spanning conspiracy across the solar system.
Many of the perpetrators of the crimes are forced into it through poverty.
And there's a clear moral commentary here on extreme capitalism.
The rich live in luxury and the pool below in a den of drugs, vice
and crime, harking back to cyberpunk roots in the eighties.
There is, of course, an evil corporation.
While I suspect we've moved beyond these archetypes in crime storytelling.
It goes with the territory of omni consumer products and Weyland.
Itami One of the most exciting and interesting puzzles in Lacuna,
is trying to figure out the appearance and identity of the assassin.
This was a challenging puzzle because the information kept changing.
As you progress the story, delving further into the clues reveals more and more,
and you'll need to use
your powers of deduction to figure out what the assassin really looks like.
You'll need all the clues and research at your disposal,
and you will find yourself referring back to your notes.
And I did really like this about the game because I don't like it in games
when all of that law and information doesn't serve a purpose
or you kind of want to skim read through it.
Here you really need to pay attention to all the facts that you've been given.
Notably, there is no safe file for you to go back and change your choices.
So if you make a mistake early on in the game,
there's no going back from it.
And that will have flow on effects to the rest of the game.
I did like this aspect because choices do matter in Lacuna
and some of those choices are very morally gray.
You will think long and hard before confirming your conclusions
and hitting that send button as a crime fiction level.
I really appreciated the depth of this game as a crime story.
My brain got caught up in the convoluted complexities of the mastermind
behind Lacuna Crime,
and I got every puzzle right except for the last one, mostly due
to the fact that I completely overthought the ending.
I've read far too many crime novels when it's clearly not the obvious answer,
which is the truth, and so therefore ignored what was obvious
and I had uncovered in order to accuse somebody else of the crime.
And I have severe regrets on that because there is no say file.
As someone who enjoys looking at narrative design,
I did appreciate how difficult some of these choices could be.
Would you lose your job if you chose a certain path?
Would somebody die?
Would you choose to withhold information in order to prevent more deaths?
This is a complex questions that are explored within the game.
The pixel art graphics hark back to point and click adventures,
and I particularly liked the way that the city grew upwards
from the train stations, which Conrad uses to navigate the city.
Excellent lighting effects and environmental depth add
significantly to the noir atmosphere.
The Music by Julian Cole.
This is a notable game soundtrack as the plaintive
piano and jazz tracks really set the tone for the game.
And I really enjoyed it as soon as I open this game up.
You get hit by that great soundtrack
and it really made me feel enmeshed in this world here.
There's little voice acting here, save for the occasional voiceover
by Conrad himself.
But the text dialog is tight, and you'll appreciate
that you're not scrolling through endless dialog choices here.
It's really sharp and a lot of the choices that you have to talk to
people are timed.
You won't have a lot of time to make those decisions.
So you really need to think carefully before you go into interrogations
and review your clues, just like I need detective actually would.
If you enjoy a choice based detective games, then
Lacuna is definitely worth checking out.
The quality puzzles provide even the most experienced gamers
with the challenge, and while it labors a little under the shadows of the genre's
archetypes, the complex plot makes it one of the better
examples of sci fi detective games that I've played.
I'm Kat Clay.
I'm a writer from Melbourne, Victoria.
I love talking about video games, tabletop gaming, nerd stuff, writing,
all of those things.
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