Lilly Looking Through, a point-and-click adventure game funded on Kickstarter last summer by Geeta Games, was finally released this weekend. My kids and I love playing point-and-click games together and Lilly Looking Through had gorgeous graphics and was family-friendly, so I was happy to back it.
The game was delayed a few months from its estimated delivery of May this year, but considering how long I’ve been waiting on some other videogame Kickstarter projects, that’s not bad at all. I’ve been playing through the game now, and although I’m currently stuck on an underwater cave puzzle, it’s been a lot of fun to play through.
The premise is that Lilly’s little brother is whisked away by a mysterious red scarf blowing in the wind, and she goes searching for him. Along the way she picks up a pair of goggles, and putting them on transports her to the same scene in the distant past. Old, crumbling ruins become shiny and new; dry gulches are filled with water.
Solving the puzzles involves switching back and forth between the present and the past to take the available paths at the time you can access them. It reminds me of an app I just played recently, The Silent Age, in which you play a custodian who gets mixed up in something much larger when he is given a portable time-traveling device. (The Silent Age is also a point-and-click adventure but is not for kids—there’s a lot of death and creepiness going on there.)
I’m not sure how many total scenes there are in Lilly Looking Through, though I’d guess I’m nearing the end now after a few hours of play. It’s not a very long game, but for under ten bucks it’s definitely worth a try. Some of the puzzles can get quite tricky, but it ramps up gradually and there’s at least a hint that shows you all the areas that can be clicked.
There are a few things that aren’t perfect: when Lilly is moving around to respond to something I’ve clicked, I have to simply watch until the animation plays out. That’s fine the first time I do an action, but sometimes if I’m doing something repeatedly to solve a puzzle I get impatient for her to just finish up and do whatever it is I clicked. The animation of Lilly and the other characters and creatures is great and the painted backgrounds are gorgeous—but they don’t fully mesh. It’s like watching a cartoon where the backgrounds are much more detailed than the characters moving around. Again, that doesn’t bother me too much, but it would have been really cool (and, I’m sure, difficult) to have Lilly match the style of the backgrounds.
Lilly Looking Through is available from the Geeta Games website, as well as Steam, GOG, and the Mac App Store. The price is $8.99 for the basic game, or you can get the Deluxe version for $14.99 which includes a PDF of artwork from the game.
