Lil Guardsman is a game that wears its heart on its sleeve. In a triumph over normative determinism, it’s a fantastical adventure about a little girl named Lil who somehow becomes the first (and seemingly only) line of defense for a city’s border patrol as a guard. At various points, both Lil and those around her frequently point out that yes, you’re just a 12-year-old kid who’s vastly underqualified for the job, and that if you’re going to keep filling in for your worthless dad who’s down at the pub playing the latest video game, what do your superiors really expect? It’s very self-aware in that sense, and it borders on breaking the fourth wall at times. That in itself is probably a pretty good indicator of whether or not you’ll get on board with Lil Guardsman’s sense of humor, but for the most part, it’s a sweet and happy narrative adventure whose distinctive animation and charming voice cast assist bring this oddball tale of fate and consequence to life.
She’s also not shy about where her main source of inspiration comes from. It’s the fantasy Papers, Please, though that’s more about questioning and probing potential townspeople for information than checking documents and spotting inconsistencies. During the day, you’ll be working at your desk, dealing with the ever-increasing but steady queues of fantasy types trying to enter the city gates to go about their business. When you’re off, it’s time to take on the game’s larger storylines, with Lil free to travel around the city to set up locations where she can talk to other townspeople, occasionally take part in the odd mini-game or two, and visit the local shop before she goes to bed. It’s a fairly straightforward interpretation of Lucas Pope’s magnum opus, to be sure, with star ratings denoting clear-cut good and bad answers about how you’re dealing with the horde on a day-to-day basis, but you know what they say about first impressions. Good ones count for a lot.
Much of this is due to Lil Guardsman’s compelling Saturday morning cartoons. Every character you meet is so beautifully drawn and voiced that it makes every encounter instantly memorable. Sure, these visuals often undermine the sense of mystery and intrigue when you’re sitting in your guard booth – you can often spot someone suspicious the moment they approach your gate – but simply calling them out on their bullshit and refusing them entry is only part of what makes Lil Guardsman tick.
For a full four-star rating, for example, the interrogation is imperative, and its purpose is to reveal the usually obvious reason why “yes, that old granny on her way to see her grandson” should be allowed through or “definitely not, that riff on a singing Disney princess is clearly a mass murderer and shouldn’t be allowed near anyone” (even if the blood on her hands and dress would be an obvious telltale sign). However, with only three action points to spend on each person before giving them a substantial, fat “Yes” or “No” on your control panel, you’ll have to consider whether to keep asking them questions or employ one of the five special tools that will assist you.
These tools consist of a (rather OP) truth spray, a metal detector, an x-ray machine (because, I don’t know, anachronisms seem to be common here), a whip, and a special ring that lets you read runes and inscriptions. Use the right combination of actions to cough up the truth, and presto, you’ll get a substantial medal for a job well done. However, if you only get part way there, the end-of-day summary text will suggest other information you could have gleaned from them if you had been more specific in your questions.
It’s all pretty tame puzzles at the end of the day, though, and as long as you meet the average (and fairly basic) rating set by your group of three advisors, you’ll get paid the same whether you’ve interrogated everyone perfectly or only partially succeeded. Later levels ramp up the difficulty a bit, but you’ll rarely feel genuinely surprised or completely let down – and if you do, there’s a magical time-traveling MacGuffin just for the occasion. Dialogue and character behavior usually make it clear which tool is most appropriate, and while all of them have circumscribed daily uses, the threat of “running out” of power crystals for them has never been a problem for me. At first, the power crystals you have seem perfectly calibrated to how many times you actually need to employ them per day, and soon you’re making so much money that buying more isn’t a problem.
The stakes are pretty low, which can make the second half of Lil Guardsman’s six-hour runtime feel a bit repetitive—or at least like you’re just repeating your daily routine over and over again, waiting for the larger (and fairly engaging) story to unfold. It does, however, make a few good attempts to mix things up, both through the return of repeat offenders (always a treat) and other light-hearted twists on the yes/no formula. These include recruiting the right citizens for the ongoing war effort in the game’s second half (your choices are broadly written out in Street Fighter-style beat ’em-up segments toward the end of the day), and at one point you even assist plan a princess’s upcoming wedding, deciding which caterers, entertainment providers, and tailors to let in. Honestly, whoever came up with the labor laws in this town should be given a good scolding—or thrown in jail along with all the goblins who’ve been ordered to stay out. But essentially by the end of the game you’re doing more or less the same thing you were doing at the beginning, and the way you do it doesn’t change or evolve much.
Papers, Please eventually fell into similar ruts, of course, but the brilliant thing about that game was that it gave you the space to take a more human approach to decision-making, so you could sympathetically fudge the numbers if you felt like being nice or empathetic to someone’s plight. Here, though, the star ratings clearly imply that there’s a “right” way to deal with these people, which can sometimes clash with your desire to break the rules when you know they’re unfair. Those goblins I mentioned are an example. Yes, it’s another fantasy game that uses genres as a cover for racism, but the fact that the game effectively presents the high score as “always listen to the human” and throws those destitute people in jail doesn’t quite make sense.
Of course, it’s not like you To have listen to the man if you don’t want to. You still essentially have that choice, and one of the more impressive things about Lil Guardsman is how much your decisions matter throughout the game. While they may seem diminutive at first, they end up having surprisingly substantial side effects, and best of all, you get to see them play out before your eyes, and then adapt and react to the consequences as the game reaches its dramatic climax. Who you draft into the war effort will have a pretty profound effect on whether your kingdom actually wins the war, for example, and even those wedding vendors get a second chance in a way I didn’t expect. There are other nippy touches, too, which I won’t spoil. I’ll just say that if you pay attention to the daily announcements on the bulletin board in your guardhouse, you can get a lot of satisfaction out of the narrative, seeing some of its more elaborate plotlines unfold over time.
It’s skillfully done, and goes a long way toward smoothing out some of the cracks that emerge from Papers, Please’s simplistic approach to access control. Overall, I had a great time and devoured the whole thing in almost one sitting. It’s also probably a good game to play with kids and youthful teens – a sort of first Papers, Please for kids, if you will, that can introduce them to the basic concept while also giving them a good story. For adults, Lil Guardsman may ultimately not get the gist of what Papers, Please itself was trying to interrogate all those years ago, but there’s no denying that its heart is always trying to be in the right place.
This review is based on the version of the game provided by publisher Versus Evil.
