Platonic
Partnership
This
is an ambitious little outing, not because of its
gameplay or style but because of the story it
wants to tell:
“Lydia
is a grim but atmospheric story-driven adventure
game which deals adults substance abuse from the
perspective of a little girl. The story is based
on developers own experiences on the subject
matter”.
Monsters
are real, and they come in all sorts of shapes and
sizes. Substance abuse, in this case alcoholism,
is just one of those. Through the back of the
wardrobe with your teddy is as good a way as any
to try and confront it.
It
is only just a game, more of a click-along tale,
and I finished in under an hour. It does manage to
pack a fair bit of thought into that hour,
exploring the different impacts the monster/s in
Lydia’s life had at those various stages. You end
with a choice, and I made the only one you really
could.
I
liked the look, a smudgy greyscale world, slightly
deranged in its formulation, occasionally more so
in its characters. The predominantly red scenes at
the end of several of the chapters help convey the
hellishness of Lydia’s situation. The occasional
profane character outbursts felt forced though,
albeit they sprang from a drunken dementia.
It
did feel a little flat, observational rather than
immersive, but that wouldn’t have been helped by
my failure to get sound except in one single
scene. The options to tweak the sound settings for
dialogue, music and effects strongly indicate it
should have been more prevalent, but whatever I
did (including reinstalling) couldn’t remedy the
situation. A little googling identifies the
characters converse in subtitled gibberish, with
the score described as varying from lightly
ambient to hideously intense, depending on the
emotion wanting to be conveyed. I wish I had heard
it.
The
game autosaves at certain points, so there is some
replaying if you leave off early. It is all point
and click, with a curser indicating the limited
places and things you can interact with. There is
a conversation conundrum or two, and you can
choose different emotions when Lydia needs to
respond (angry, apologetic, afraid, courteous
etc). To my knowledge your choice won’t impact the
story.
Lydia
isn’t fun but it isn’t trying to be. It does what
it does rather well, even without sound, and while
it won’t be for everyone its makers deserve credit
for their ambition.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
RAM: 32GB GDDR5
