Shardlight - Review

Shardlight review: A pixelated post-apocalypse point-and-click pleasure

I’ve come to love/hate Wadjet Eye’s games over the years. Whether produced in-house or developed by others, the titles put out under the Wadjet Eye banner (Primordia, Blackwell, Gemini Rue, Technobabylon) are unerringly some of the best-written adventure games of the modern era…

…And also the most frustrating.

Shardlight is no different. Set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged first by bombs, then by a mysterious disease known as “Green Lung,” Shardlight is as grim as point-and-clicks come. Within the first ten minutes a man asked me to kill him. Things got darker from there.

Soylent Green Lung is people

You play as Amy Wellard, recently infected with Green Lung. As a mechanic, she’s skilled enough to qualify for the government’s “Lottery Jobs” a.k.a. work so dangerous that only people with nothing to lose would want to volunteer. Doing these jobs earns workers a ticket for the titular lottery though, and the prize for winning? A Green Lung vaccine, which temporarily rids a person of symptoms for a period of about a month.

[…]