Lil' Guardsman Review

Lil wasn't supposed to be here today!

All image credits: Hilltop Studios/tinyBuild/Versus Evil

Lil' Guardsman is a seven-hour game that’s bursting at the seams with heart and humour. For all intents and purposes, it’s a point-and-click adventure game that cribs heavily from Papers, Please, but lightens the tone several degrees and wraps it up in a fantasy setting. Mix in colourful and extremely well-done graphics and deservedly award-winning voice performances, and you’ve got a game that is absolutely worth your time.

When loveable rascal Hamish wants to skive off work at the guard house to go gamble on the Goblinball game, he subs in his 12-year-old daughter, Lilian (aka Lil, aka the eponymous Lil’ guardsman) to go and do his shift for him. A zany set-up to be sure, and the game makes sure you know that it knows how silly it is. The humour is irreverent throughout and if that’s not your cup of tea you will likely bounce off Lil’ Guardsman, but if you do, then the game really stands out as a best-in-class example of it.

The gameplay loop consists of Lil doing shifts at the guard house. You set up your tools with a limited number of energy crystals and either admit or deny entry to the gaggle of applicants, using your tools to determine whether they are who they claim, and whether the Royal Advisors have any rules about their admittance. If you’re not happy with your decision when the results come in, you can rewind to the start of the encounter and change your actions using the handy dandy Chronometer3000. Yes, it’s perfectly safe for a 12-year-old to have a time-control device, why do you ask?

In between shifts, you can travel to different parts of the city and talk to its inhabitants, from Signor Cappello Fantastico, a man on a quest for a hat so fantastic it’ll live up to his old fantastic hat, to Mrs Abernathy, who won’t stop gambling away her pension. Sometimes you’ll encounter the folks you allowed entry to the city, and sometimes, you’ll get embroiled in the factional conflict that’s bringing strife to The Sprawl.

The overarching story is interesting and engaging. Princess Desdemona has run away, right as she is expected to make a political marriage to an heir from one of two nearby nations. Will you do what you can to bring harmony to the city or will you sow malcontent amongst its residents? Lil’ Guardsman manages to make your choices really feel like they matter by returning to them frequently with references or recurring characters. Every time the message popped up letting me know that my actions would have consequences, I felt a thrill – what consequences? What will the Scary Tree Monster do after I tell him he should go into politics? Will the Duchess of Scarborough ever get over the untimely passing of her beloved cat, Sprankles? Will Signor Fantastico ever find a new hat??

Lil’ as a main character is a delight to play. She’s sassy, funny, and has just enough attitude to make her interesting to embody. The relationships between characters are also very well-crafted, particularly the one between Lil’ and her dad Hamish. He’s not winning any Father of the Year awards but he loves Lil’ very much, and she loves him, too. Everyone is interesting and memorable and getting to know them and their stories is a huge part of what makes the game enjoyable. The fact that everyone is voice-acted is icing on the cake – many games with this much writing would not be as ambitious, but Lil’ Guardsman knocks it out of the park, performance-wise, with Jillian Welsh as Lil especially.

The game frequently nods to the fourth wall with its irreverent humour.

I do have some small criticisms about Lil’ Guardsman, but before I get to them I want to underscore a few things. Firstly, if you like what I’ve said so far then you’ll definitely have a great time with the game, niggles aside. Don’t let my minor complaints sway you. I really enjoyed Lil’ Guardsman. Additionally, I don’t really play this kind of point-and-click puzzle game that much. I have a decent time when I do, and pretty much never regret diving in, but I’m more of an action gamer, and I think that skewed my perspective on some things. As with everything on QuickPlay, I am but one little goblin and my points of view and opinions are very personal – take my words with a grain of salt. For Lil’ Guardsman, my criticisms revolve around three things – pacing, gameplay, and story. None of them are drastic but they all tripped me up in small ways.

I think the game’s pacing is a little off – I know that’s not very scientific, but it felt simultaneously like it dragged a bit and simultaneously didn’t let the story breathe. Walking around the areas feels very slow and there are only so many times I can appreciate how well an area has been drawn before I tire of it. Every character you encounter at the guard house has an epilogue after that shift is complete. At first, I thought this was fun, and the writing was excellent, but by the end of the game, I was tempted to start skipping through them because several characters would get two or three pages of text to read about their misadventures. In Papers, Please, there are very few ‘interesting encounters’ dotted through the drudgery of your work day, making them shine all the more brightly. In Lil’ Guardsman, it felt like 75% of the people I encountered were plot-relevant. I know it makes sense to do it this way because you engage much more with each person in this game than in Lucas Pope’s bleak border simulator, but it was a little jarring that everyone had a part to play. I definitely think this could be a plus if you’ve got a different brain than me, which you most certainly do.

Gameplay-wise, I really enjoyed the interrogative, puzzling nature of the guard duties. Following that day’s Royal Writ to make sure the right people are admitted to The Sprawl was a nifty challenge, but there are two main ways it fell down for me. Firstly, you have to add power crystals to your tools before the start of your shift but there’s no way of knowing what you’ll need (I put a crystal in the Bull Whip about four times before deciding I’d never need it) on any given day. It felt entirely like that was down to luck. If I was missing my metal detector on a day I needed it, tough luck. You’re not allowed to pop a crystal in on the fly. Likewise, if you need two squirts of truth potion but only loaded up one, too bad. I found this needlessly frustrating.

Would you let the Scary Tree Monster in?

My second gameplay gripe is also connected to the tools, tangentially. You’re only allowed to perform three actions on each applicant, and it truly felt to me like there was often no way to know whether I should be using one tool or the other, or just questioning them. The difference between needing the metal detector and the x-ray machine especially seemed like a coinflip situation. There are definitely some instances where you can work out what you need to do, but way more that were just guesswork. This was probably the game’s biggest flaw in my eyes – and I honestly don’t even know if I was just unable to figure it out in some places (I do have a track record of being Bad But Enthusiastic when it comes to puzzle games).

The third and final gripe is about how the gameplay and the story interact. When you choose what to do with an applicant, you get a rating out of four stars (you can only get the fourth star by figuring out the story behind each person through the correct application of your tools). In-game, this is granted by the Royal Advisors, so you get more stars for following their directives. However, that’s a mask over a more traditional “how well did you do this puzzle” grading system, and therein lies the rub. You can’t really exercise Lil’s autonomy to let in the Goblins in the face of a racist doctrine because you get marked down for going against the letter of the law. Of course, you get fined in Papers, Please for the same thing, but having an overall rating for the day can mitigate this – you can still ace the day even with a few indiscretions. In Lil’ Guardsman, you’re graded person by person – there’s a black-and-white right or wrong thing to do which meant that no matter how sympathetic I was to Chuck and the Goblin Liberation Army, I didn’t let them in when I was told not to. Again, maybe this is a me thing, but I think the subtle differences between how these systems have been designed, despite being really similar on the face of it, made me behave differently as a player in a way that I didn’t prefer.

All that aside, I really liked Lil’ Guardsman and I’m glad I played it. It definitely feels like a bit of a sleeper hit that loads more people have played given how much work and love clearly went into it. It’s a diamond in the rough and I will be watching closely to see what the team releases next because I definitely want to see where they go.

• Game: Lil’ Guardsman

• Developer: Hilltop Studios

• Publisher: tinyBuild/Versus Evil

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox

• Time to complete: 7 hours

• Note - I received the key for this game for free to write this review

Ali’s update corner

Hey everyone! Long time no see, I’m sorry! The last two months of 2024 were absolutely brutal for me. I was working, doing university assignments (I feel vindicated for how much time I put into them because I did pretty well last semester), and generally trying to keep my head above water. My mental health was pretty poor during December too for a variety of reasons and I hardly played anything. A lot of this is due to my work situation becoming pretty unstable, so if you can afford to subscribe to this blog or send some funds my way on Ko-fi if you like what I do, I’d be so grateful. I hope you all had a wonderful festive period and are keeping warm during this chilly weather. See you next time, hopefully a bit sooner than the last.