INTRO:
Through the Samorost series, Amanita Design has shown that a point-and-click adventure game does not need much in the way of voice-overs or even persistent story-telling to be captivating. This has inspired other indie game-makers to make their own, one of which is Geeta Games.
After a small but successful Kickstarter campaign and a development time of about a year, its game was released in 2013. It did not achieve a high profile, but players who did play it have a mostly good opinion of it.
PREMISE:
Child protagonists are nothing new in video games. In the case of the one for Lilly Looking Through, that would be the eponymous Lilly.
Lilly lives in a village in some marshy place. The game begins during what appears to be early dawn. Lilly is up, looking for interesting things to play with, as one would expect of an energetic child who gets up early. Lilly is not the only child around; a boy appears, and he is soon fascinated with a peculiar pair of googles. (The boy would be revealed as “Row”, a familial acquaintance of Lilly’s.)
A red shawl catches Lilly’s eye, but it seems to flit away whenever it is within reach. Then, somehow, it wraps itself around the aforementioned boy and spirits him and the goggles away. Lilly is momentarily moved to tears and sobs by the sudden change of events, but like any adventure game protagonist, gains her resolve. She sets out into a possibly fantastical world overrun by nature, intent on the boy’s rescue.
POINT-AND-CLICK:
The aforementioned story scene also serves as the tutorial for the game’s point-and-click system. Any veteran of this sub-genre of adventure games would be quite familiar with it almost immediately, especially if he/she has played any of the Samorost titles.
Unlike the Samorost titles though, interactive objects are not always clearly contrasted against the rest of the scene. Fortunately, there is a “hint” button that the player can click on. This highlights all the interactive objects that are currently relevant to whatever the player is trying to do, though this is not enough to spoil the solution.
GUARDIAN ANGEL:
Some interactive objects, when activated, become the player’s cursor. Then, the player has to use the cursor on something in the scene to make progress.
People who have played the Samorost games may be familiar with this gameplay. However, where the player does most of the work in those Amanita Design games, Lilly does most of the work instead. Rather, the player would be doing things that would be unseemly for children to do, such as setting things on fire or handling objects with sharp pointy ends.
“THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS”:
The title of the game is already a reference to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s classical work. However, instead of a telescope, the ocular device that allows transportation between realities is the aforementioned pair of goggles. It is obtained shortly after the prologue scenes.
Somehow, whenever Lilly puts on the goggles, she is transported to what is implied to be the past. The player would have to do something in the past and then switch back to the present to utilize the results of that. The best example of such time-travelling cause-and-effect puzzles is one that involves the placing and re-placing of an acorn in the past.
TIMING PUZZLES:
Some of the puzzles require the player to time jumps for Lilly. (There is no possibility of her falling to a painful demise by the way; the game will just not allow that to happen.)
In one of them, the player has to rearrange some moving things before attempting the jumps. Conveniently, Lilly’s posture changes when a jump is possible, but the player’s window of opportunity is exactly the animated transition for this.
In another puzzle, the player has to swap timelines so that Lilly makes a successful jump. That Lilly can readjust the goggles in mid-air can cause a bit of disbelief, but of course, this is a video game.
UNSKIPPABLE IN-GAME CUTSCENES:
Unfortunately, Geeta Games has not learned a design practice that has been around in adventure games for a while: letting the player skip in-game cutscenes. Of course, the player might want to see the cutscenes the first time around.
However, if the player resumes the game from any one of the scenes, the player has to see the animations that shows how Lilly entered the scene again. The player also encounters the same problem when abandoning a puzzle partway through and returning later; the player has to watch all of the animations for the solution steps that the player has already figured out.
COLOUR PUZZLES:
In the last few scenes of the game, the player is challenged by colour-based puzzles. Initially, these may seem obtuse, due to the lack of immediately noticeable hints.
The first of the puzzles is mostly a matter of trial and error, albeit a short one. The only possible hint to be had is the colour of the sky.
The second and third colour puzzles actually requires the player to remember what he/she has done in the first puzzle; tubes that connect the contraption in the first puzzle to the one in the second are the hint.
At least the last colour puzzle that the player would come across has more hints in the form of a light indicator and a certain large cloth object of an obvious colour.
The most significant problem with the colour puzzles is that they might not be doable by people with colour blindness. The puzzles do make use of colours with hues that are close to each other on the visual spectra, such as blue-red-purple and yellow-orange. There are few, if any, other visual indicators for progress-making changes in these puzzles.
VISUAL DESIGNS:
Most of the visuals in this game are hand-drawn artwork. This can be seen in the environments of the scenes and their backgrounds. The artwork disguises an invisible 3D environment, which is used for the positioning of Lilly’s and other characters’ models.
Speaking of which, Lilly and Row have very simple-looking models. In fact, they could have been rudimentary models with single-colour polygons. However, their animations go a long way to hide this; they are quite convincing at portraying small nimble children, albeit ones with cartoonish bodily proportions.
In fact, having Lilly fail at a solution can be just as entertaining as having her succeed, if only to watch her fumble in amusing ways (as fumbling children would) and how the game avoids having children being harmed by mishaps.
There are only a few other living creatures to be encountered in the game. There are three animals that appear to have models that have more polygons than the human ones do, but they do not have much of any role in the game.
Cel-shading provides the lighting and shadowing for the models. It is mostly convincing, though the player would be looking at the rest of the scene more than he/she would the models.
As for the environments, they seem to be diverse just for the sake of diversity. Somewhere close to the end of the game, there are arctic landscapes, where a scene earlier there were coastal areas. Of course, one could argue that Lilly may have been transported across considerable distances, as suggested by the loading screens. Yet, they do not yield much information, implied or explicit, on the geographical setting of game.
(The cliffhanger ending of the game suggests that this would be the focus of the sequel, which has yet to be made.)
SOUND DESIGNS:
Most of the music in Lilly Looking Through is melancholic, suggesting a theme of nostalgia. This is perhaps a bit fitting, considering the time-shifting gameplay element.
All of the environments in the scenes are serene. The most ambience that the player would hear are the sounds of flowing water and the breeze.
There is very little voice-acting to be heard. Most of them are Lilly’s illegible utterances when she makes physical exertions. The sound clip for her gasp is used particularly often.
The only legible dialogue to be heard is between Lilly and her brother, and there are few moments of these anyway. If there is any praise for the voice-overs, it is that the voice-overs for the two siblings are provided by two real-life siblings (according to the credits), so their call-outs to each other do sound convincingly genuine.
SUMMARY:
As an indie game made on a relatively small budget (albeit a five-digit one in US dollars), Lilly Looking Through is a mostly competently done point-and-click adventure game. On the other hand, people who have played Amanita Design’s games would have seen better designs, especially in the matter of skipping animations and cutscenes.