Lacuna - A SciFi Noir Adventure is a pixel art detective game that I was interested in due to one of their devlog blog posts that was basically about the challenge of puzzle design for these games. It’s a good read, and their solution sounded interesting.
You enter a scene and get some goals that need to be met before you can move to the next one. It might be just making sure you visit all the key locations in a scene, or it might require you to answer a multiple choice question on the case. So potter around, find the evidence, talk to all people, and then it’s off to the next scene. Answering the questions wrong still lets you advance to the next scene, but it might affect the options you have available in the future. The benefit of this system is that they can have incremental progress in the solving of the case, but still have it feel like there’s some stakes in getting those incremental solutions right.
After playing the game, I still have no idea of how that system will actually work in practice… Unfortunately the designers had no confidence in the players, and made the puzzles so easy that the consequences of failure are completely theoretical. The required deductions are extremely simple. There’s no need for reading between the lines since the game will make sure that the important facts from conversations get highlighted, and since you can’t even try to answer the question if you don’t have access to all the clues. If there’s anything funky or ambiguous going on, some character is likely to outright tell you how to solve the puzzle.
You also need to have an understanding of the case for the dialogue selection system, since you often can’t exhaust the whole conversation tree, and need to have a good enough grasp of the case to make the right dialogue choices. This needs to be done without referring to the Codex (which is intentionally not accessible during a conversation). These feel more satisfying than the multiple choice questionnaires about the case.
The writing for the actual gameplay is fine, but nothing brilliant. The noir monologues from the protagonist are just the cheesiest shit in the world, except I’m pretty sure it was written completely earnestly. The plot is too obvious and straightforward, with no real twists or red herrings.
Lacuna is not a very long game. My playthrough was 4.5 hours, and probably at least 1.5 hours was spent on just routine level traversal which felt like pure padding. It feels like a number of scenes could have gone very differently based on my choices, but it’s very hard to justify another playthrough to see the alternatives.