I didn’t want Shardlight to end. I played it over three nights and I missed it profusely when it was over. Why? I wanted more of just being there, which is an odd thing to say about most post-apocalyptic settings. Twenty years after Blast Day, people are lean and ravaged by Green Lung. As well as accepting dangerous work for tickets in the vaccine lottery, however, they make pottery, restore cars and genuinely band together as a community of friends.
This is not to say the place is without violence, control and your typical dystopian class system. Just that, when tensions turn ugly, you’ve already come to appreciate what is being lost. Always, real hope for the future remains. Even in the church with a plane wrecked in its side, a beautiful cult plays music and comforts each other as they wait for death. Well, I’m not sure that’s “hope,” perse, but it is peculiarly lovely and pleasurable.
The narrative strikes a clever balance of revealing what you most want to know about the setting incrementally, without preventing your imagination from wistfully filling in the blanks. For example, local children are skipping to macabre rhymes, which hint at obscure atrocities and fearful rumours. I wondered if their parents would approve of their choice of song. Then I wondered if their parents were dead. Then I noticed the families blended by circumstance.
The protagonist, Amy Wellard, is part herself and part narrator. She knows what she knows about her surroundings but she is talking to you. She never refers to the player, specifically, but implicitly provides information for someone from a different time and place, while remaining firmly in character. Mostly, dialogue seamlessly switches between commenting on what you are clicking on, then elaborating based on some private memory of it.
At one point, Amy describes an abandoned factory, as you choose what to see and interact with, and local layabout, Denby, joins the conversation as if she were talking to him. He’s the only character who notices her musing. It’s incredibly endearing. People also treat Amy warmly and it makes her very sympathetic. And, she really is expressly sweet in an adventure game context, with lines like, “You’re coming with me, bucket.” Why? We’ll figure it out, later.
I could continue to laud the story, and how the glowing shards referenced in the title aren’t ever explained, yet I went a-googling them for a good ten minutes. But, I must mention the extraordinary artwork by Ben Chandler, a Perth-based designer who I became friends with and interviewed for Generation XX several years ago, based on his original collection of small adventure games. It’s really interesting to see his art developing over time.
He uses a bleak and seemingly limited palette of colours, all brown and yellow, but there is such contrast between locations, from detailed, homey markets to desperate salt flats. Composition is noticeably evocative, like the wide, downward facing view into the prison making it seem all the more imposing. Similarly, the character portraits are uncommonly expressive for the genre, especially the cheeky Lady Twiner, and except for those behind porcelain gas masks.
Although I missed Amy and her world when the game was over, I didn’t want it to be more. The scope was exactly on point, with every character, location and puzzle contributing to the overall experience in its own meaningful way. Wadjet Eye adventures have been consistently strong and, in my opinion, Shardlight is the best so far. So, pick up a copy and may death come for you swiftly, unless you find faith in something better.