Lacuna
Smoking is officially cool again.
Lacuna is a sci-fi adventure game where you play as hard-boiled CDI agent Neil Conrad, tracking down the assassin who just murdered a diplomatic envoy you were tasked with protecting. Along the way, you’ll have to make many important choices – how to engage with citizens, colleagues, and suspects, how to reconnect with your ex-wife and daughter, and whether or not to kick your smoking habit. That last one’s not much of a choice, though, is it?1
The game is relatively linear, and traces through just a handful of turbulent days, shuttling you from one locale to the next once you’ve at least found the absolute bare minimum of evidence and walked back to the nearest train station. Lacuna wisely strips out the need for pixel hunts by giving you an option to highlight all interactive and examinable objects and NPCs with relevant dialogue, so although there is an ‘investigation’ mode you swap into, you’re not forced to comb through areas in it.
You don’t have an inventory to manage, or need to combine arbitrary items to progress. Is this even technically an adventure game? Most of the gameplay involves picking dialogue choices in conversations with NPCs and filling out multiple choice quizzes on your phone. Based on your choices and how you score on your quizzes, you might get some slight branching of the story, get access to more hints and clues, and eventually feed into what ending you’ll get, but you can’t go too far off the trail without getting shoved back in line by your colleagues.
Frankly, the fact that the game ends up being pretty narrow and linear plays to its strengths, which are the story, the atmosphere, and the pacing. Though the game technically takes place in the context of an interplanetary civilization with near-future tech, you spend the entirety of it [after a short introductory segment] just in a major city on the most urbanized planet, and so you get a lot of walking through busy streets, climbing fire escapes, and stopping to smoke a cig while gazing at some vista. And since there’s not a lot of pixel hunting, inventory management, or long, repeating dialogue trees, you basically get all the information presented to you, then can sit down and go over your notes until you’re satisfied and ready to move on.
The story is genuinely pretty good, and ties together conspiracies, corruption, criminal mercenaries, divorced dad drama, and tariffs and trade regulations into a narrative that is neither convoluted nor as boring or straightforward as you might expect. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly memorable or engaging, but it is elevated by relatively solid writing, and the occasional voiced internal monologue, which is thankfully the only voice acting in the game.
Speaking of the voice acting, I think the sound design and music are well done, and the game’s art and animations are fantastic. I’m usually not a big fan of this chunky pixel look, because it’s so often a lazy appropriation of ‘low-res-punk’ that has clashing elements, inconsistent pixel size and alignment, and just looks like shit, but Lacuna pulls it off pretty well. Characters are chunky but still distinct, there’s plenty of detail and motion both in characters and backgrounds without cluttering the screen, and the dynamic lighting works without breaking the graphical style. Plus I like Neil’s little pompadour bouncing as he runs.
That said, while I think the game has a good pace and story for a single playthrough, there are a lot of problems, especially with replaying it to experience different endings, which you must do from the start every time, as the game works on an autosave system, and you would have to cheat to roll back to major branches. For one thing, there are a number of cutscenes that cannot be skipped, and play out in real time, with no input from the player, including a lot that probably didn’t need to be unskippable, like walk-and-talks with certain characters, where if you get through the dialogue too quickly you’re stuck just plodding along in silence when there’s no good reason to not cut you loose. I ran into a few of these in my initial playthrough, because I read a bit more quickly than I think the developers expected, but I burned out on a second loop trying to experiment with different options because I got hung up on them so much.
Another problem I had with the game is that it just doesn’t do a whole lot with the setting – all of the near-future stuff is pretty much irrelevant to the actual case, the interplanetary conflict would work perfectly fine as a simple international incident, and the Blade Runner flying cars and cybernetic augments and all that really have zero impact on the story, the gameplay, and the setting. It’s not even a case of this game being so old the world shockingly caught up to it – it’s from 2021, we could track boat GPS units and Airdrop files between cell phones long before this game was written. I just don’t know what the point of the framing is beyond giving them an excuse to draw the ONE full-screen cutaway of your guy ripping a dart while gazing out at a vaguely sci-fi skyline.
In one of the voiced monologues, Neil mentions that his augments are pumping him full of stimulants and keeping him alert for a morning mission after a full night of investigation, and that seems like the sort of thing that should be… I don’t know, more important and interesting than a single throwaway line, and the same with the idea that some of the perps you’re chasing presumably have military grade combat augs or higher than human levels of perception. But none of that matters. This could’ve been set in, like, the ‘80s, with very minor rewrites of incidental material.
Finally, I think the story, while generally decent, is a bit too on-the-nose with its anti-corporate message. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with a good anti-corpo screed, I leapt at the chance to drag some corporats through the mud at the end of my playthrough, and my biggest disappointment with the game is that I didn’t get to put a fucking bullet in the head of the CEO who arrogantly pointed an armed drone at me. But there’s just too many news articles about wage gaps, NPCs bemoaning gentrification, and characters huffing about how arrogant and untouchable the rich and powerful are for how short the game is.
And then on top of all that excessive external framing, it feels like too many points in the plot and character backgrounds specifically dip back in for a very naked anti-corporate message. Everyone who does anything bad has to have some tragic background of corporate abuse OR be acting entirely in the interests of a corporation – there’s little room for any consideration beyond corporate interest in anyone’s actions, which may be the most realistic part of the game’s setting [ho ho ho!] but left me rolling my eyes a bit.
And because I didn’t feel like sitting through what is probably at least 20 minutes worth of walking behind people, running through a few areas with no clues, punching through conversations that don’t have dialogue options, and standing around waiting for my train, I can’t say with much confidence how much impact you actually have on the story. It seems like the main ‘branches’ are determined by whether or not you fill out the main multiple choice Sheet for each chapter’s mystery correctly, and everything else feeds into giving you extra clues, your reputation with a few NPCs so you can influence them later, and the Fallout-esque epilogue slideshow.
Lacuna is a tight enough adventure game, at least for one playthrough, that I feel like it’s well worth the couple of bucks you can pick it up for on sale. It’s refreshing to play through what is essentially a short visual novel that is not too long or too overwritten, and a detective-ing game that doesn’t try to be an open-world sprawl and then make you leave Batman Vision on the whole time. It’s also good to have an adventure game where you can fuck up and get people killed or miss something important and not feel like the developers are jeering at you. But most of all, it’s nice to see media that properly depicts smoking as a cool, relaxing thing that people enjoy. The planet is healing.
Lacuna can be purchased on Steam, GOG, Switch, Xbox, and PS4.
It genuinely is not - although there is an achievement for completely ignoring every prompt that allows you to contextually choose to smoke, Neil occasionally lights up completely of his own volition, which is funny and totally appropriate.