Lil' Guardsman Review (noe)
To me this game is superficially humourous and not particularly entertaining beyond the scattered jokes that actually land; as both the gameplay and writing feel haphazardly designed.
The production itself is relatively well rounded. The game feels polished enough, especially with the full voice-acting. Yet certain aspects of it do feel cheap still. The main character has a fully animated walk cycle but the movement of just about every other character is hidden by a fade to black, which blatantly cuts up the flow of scenes. A lot of emphasis is placed on the characters but their models do not actively change to reflect whether they are talking or not, which also creates a disconnect in the presentation. There are several other instances where the presentation and production seem abruptly budgetary as well. This standing out all the more when compared to the otherwise polished experience.
The writing is distinctly superficial and lacks much immersive depth. The protagonist is meant to be a twelve year old child and the game description explicitly highlights their age, yet their behaviour is scarcely different from any of the surrounding adults in the story. The protagonist constantly makes inorganic, often self-aware and even fourth-wall breaking statements that seem to be intended as jokes; but their responses seldom mesh with the conversation and mostly derail the atmosphere. This alone makes it difficult to sink into the experience when the main character does not really sound like a person so much as a very transparent vehicle for generic funny remarks which they constantly try to make. Many of the characters similarly feel very flat and are blatantly designed to fill a specific role in the current sequence. At best they come across as a one-trick joke and at worst a monotonous caricature desperately trying to be a one-trick joke, with various less exciting individuals in-between.
The plot tries extremely hard to contrive the situations that the developers apparently wanted in the story, to such a degree that it's borderline frustrating to rationalize. Such as a random person giving the child a time-travelling device to experiment with or some government members spontaneously deciding they want the child to run the guard station; it just makes absolutely zero sense why various events unironically happen. No effort is made to cleverly establish or weave together a narrative that both allows and explains these otherwise fantastical occurrences, they just happen with complete seriousness in tow. Even if some grand twist does explain it all later in the story, which I cannot confirm or deny, this would still do nothing to resolve the immediate absurdity and lack of immersion that comes from these unbelievable events.
The core gameplay appears to revolve around interacting with characters and choosing their fate at the guard station, with the player receiving a grade based on how many significantly unique interactions they successfully triggered with the character. Unfortunately most of the interaction systems operate on a finite resource economy, restricting how many options the player has. This creates a system of trial and error where players are ultimately forced to experiment and reset over and over if they actually want to get a better score and experience more facets of the game, as they are physically unable to explore every option in one organic instance. Yet the game places an overwhelming amount of emphasis on interacting with each character and building a progressive story; even though it also encourages the player to reset and engage in repetitious trial and error which breaks up the narrative flow.
Apparently this experience also has game-overs that are triggered by completely innocuous choices and thus the player is randomly forced to repeat a sequence from scratch because they dared to pick a specific option that happened to have a lethal result. The game-over I experienced wasn't even particularly funny or interesting, and minimal production was even invested into the scene beyond yet another fourth-wall breaking joke line; otherwise it was essentially just a spontaneous nuisance.
Players exclusively looking for a cartoon experience that makes them chuckle or maybe laugh every once in a while could be satisfied by this game, especially if they just ignore the rating mechanic and all the things tethered to it. Otherwise the mechanical system isn't deep enough to be particularly interesting on its own, and encourages trial and error gameplay that looks more tedious than anything. The protagonist is a shallow, uninspired factory of contrived one-liners and most of the other characters sound like flat and forgettable props which only exist to fulfil the current scene. Meanwhile the overarching plot in its opening is an inane jumble of barely justified happenstances, that exclusively exist to setup the very specific story that the developers are trying to tell. All-together making the entire game world feel extremely scripted and inorganic.
Nothing about this experience felt particularly meaningful or engaging in the first hour and half, nor did there seem to be any indication that the rest of the game would become anymore eventful beyond that. Between the sometimes high-effort and sometimes low-effort production, the superficial and contrived comedy, the shallow and flat character writing, the irrational plot points and the gameplay which simultaneously encourages and discourages experimentation; it feels like the developers did not truly understand any of the conceptual elements they implemented into this game.
If you're interested in finding some games that I do positively recommend they can be found on my curator page here .