Grundislav unveils first details of Lamplight City

Written by Jack Allin — September 27, 2016 at 13:37

Francisco "Grundislav" Gonzalez has been collaborating with Wadjet Eye Games recently (A Golden Wake, Shardlight), but that hasn't stopped him from doing a little moonlighting on the side – or perhaps "lamplighting" is a better word for it.

Lamplight City is the name of Grundislav's next game, described as a "detective adventure set in an alternate steampunk-ish 'Victorian' past." The titular "thriving port city of New Bretagne is a beacon of progress and industrial advancement in the New World", but like all paragons of utopian modernity, "beneath the promises of a shining 19th-century future, the city rests upon foundations of poverty, class struggle, and crime." Within these "shadowy corners" of Lamplight City is Miles Fordham, once a police detective and now a private eye. But Fordham has an even bigger problem, as he's haunted by the voice of his dead former partner and is slowly being driven insane. For Miles, the question is whether he can "find justice for his clients and track down his partner’s killer before his entire world comes apart."

As you'd expect from a Grundislav game, Lamplight City features a pixel art design topping out at a whopping 640x400 resolution. But there will be a lot to see and do throughout an "entire fictional city with four boroughs to explore, each with their own unique flavor." Heavily inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens, the game will feature five distinct cases to solve, "each with multiple potential suspects, false leads, and lasting consequences." There will be no traditional inventory, but you will need to collect clues for your casebook instead.

Though we'd imagine Wadjet Eye might end up being involved at some point, for now Lamplight City is Grundislav's own project, with a correspondingly unspecified release target sometime in 2017.