Recent reviews by lachsen

Disclaimer: I know the developer personally, which is why this review can be considered biased.

Still, I honestly had a great time with Lacuna and recommend this to everyone who enjoys games with a focus on narrative and detective-work.

I played through the game once and will likely play it again, since your choices really seem to have an impact on the story.

The game combines pixel art with several effects such as dynamic lighting and fog. Together with the soundtrack and an overall great sound design, it creates a very captivating and moody atmosphere.

The pacing is great as the story progresses at a rapid pace and you never end up being stuck at one location for too long, e.g. trying to find a clue that you missed.

One of my favorite aspects of Lacuna is how the actual "detective work" is handled. Rather than giving you very limited option or forcing you towards the correction solution, you are provided with "sheets" in which you have to fill in a number of answers, with an increasing number of options as the game progress. To answer them correctly, you actually have to pick up clues in all the dialogs, emails and news that you receive and deduct the answers from them - pretty much on your own.
The game provides very little handholding other of highlighting important words in texts (which is a great help). And despite all that, the difficulty feels well balanced!

I enjoyed the story as well, which had a good balance between characters and world building. I especially liked the fact that it's sometimes quite hard to choose "which side" to pick. Things tend to be gray and morally ambiguous.

Be aware that Lacuna is all about the story and the detective-work and the gameplay is entirely focused on that aspect. There are no action sequences and very little exploration. While there are a lot of visual details hidden in the world, there are few places where you can interact with objects or people. Because of that, the world of the game might feel a bit shallow, but this aspect is probably part of the reason why the detective-gameplay works so well: you are not overwhelmed with details you might have to consider. Still, a few more NPC dialogs would have been nice!

Another thing I noticed after playing for several hours: the text turned out a bit hard to read. That's especially true for the news articles in the menu, which tend to be somewhat longer as well.

Despite those issues, I can recommend Lacuna to every fan of detective games, because this game really comes close to making you feel like one!

Great sound design and atmosphere, good writing and interesting sci-fi setting. Very curious on how the story will continue!