Leadlight Gamma

I played the original Leadlight for a only a few minutes; I don't really like playing games on an emulator. (Why? I don't know.) But the premise of the game -- Dario Argento meets Crowther and Woods -- was always interesting to me. I'm also really happy to see more people selling IF as if, hmm, their work is actually worth something!

This version of Leadlight is sort of an interesting hybrid: the two-word parser and simple gameplay are faithful to the original, while the presentation is slick and modern (for IF), with a map, a music player and, after you've won, unlockable content.

The story is, I would say, heavily inspired by the movie Suspiria, though the terse writing style gives it its own flavor. (Spoiler - click to show)There are both puzzles and "secrets" (the latter being mostly non-essential interactions that provide flavor, backstory, or a bit of fun) which, after I figured out the two-word idiom of the game, came mostly pretty easily -- I was stumped for a few days at the very end, then sat down and figured it out in a rush. There are also "death traps," which are sometimes hard or impossible to see coming; you can automatically undo from these deaths but it will cost you points at the end, so they are basically there to give the player a reason to play again and try for a perfect score. You will probably have to get in the right mood to enjoy the old-school feel of the whole thing -- I did, and did. The old-school text adventure vibe helps make the horrific content more palatable: I wouldn't really want to play this as a 3d graphical game, or probably even as a more lushly written text game.

The extra features: the map was a nice inclusion. The landscape is more sprawling than your average piece of IF these days, and it comes in handy. I didn't figure out how to use the music player until the very end, but it was a cool addition. I also liked the save-slot feature.

I hope this sells well.