Metropolis: Lux Obscura

True story: Back in 2007, I burned about half of my hand in a pretty severe kitchen fire. This left me unable to play pretty much every game I owned, which a feeling I had never experienced before. The one game that got me through this dark time was Puzzle Quest on the Nintendo DS, the wildly addictive Bejeweled RPG that could easily be played with one hand. I don't know if it's because of the accident or if Puzzle Quest was just that good of a game, but I do know that I have an undying love for this formula. Couple the match-three gameplay with Frank Miller's Sin City and you have Metropolis: Lux Obscura, a surprisingly effective thriller by first time developer Ktulhu Solutions. If I ever hurt my hand again, I know just the game I'm going to turn to.

This is the story of Jon Lockhart, a low-level thug who gets framed for murder and winds up in the slammer. He's out now, hoping to find some work and track down the scumbag that set him up. With limited options, Jon turns to a local crime boss and accidentally gets mixed up in a really bad situation involving an attractive young woman and a politician's son. How you react to the situation will change the path and ending, so Jon will need to choose wisely if he wants to make it out of this story alive.

When we're not running jobs and tracking down lowlifes, we'll spend most of the time playing a series of Bejeweled-style match-three puzzles. Much like Puzzle Quest, the idea is to defeat an opponent by matching a bunch of different icons. Most of the pieces are self-explanatory -- you'll punch by matching fists, kick by matching boots and stun the opponent if you can line up a series of tasers. The board also has pieces you can use to heal Jon and make him angry, something that will boost the amount of damage he inflicts on his foes.

There are a few things that set this apart from Puzzle Quest and its ilk. For one thing, you're not taking turns matching objects. Jon does all of the matching, but will occasionally take damage from the opponent. This forces you to plan your moves carefully in order to maintain the upper hand. To make things trickier, the board will be littered with police badges that will hurt our hero when matched up.

Another change is that you can move pieces the entirety of the board, not just one space. That's not to say you can move the pieces anywhere, but you can move them as far up, down, left and right as you want to go. It's such a simple change, but it makes a big difference and kept Metropolis from feeling like just another clone.

Unfortunately, this game ditches the role-playing elements in favor of a more simplistic upgrade system. You'll get a choice between four perks after every stage, which includes everything from increasing your health to taking less damage to replacing police badges with something more beneficial. There are a bunch of these perks, but you'll only be able to upgrade a handful before the game ends. While I miss having a deeper leveling up system, I do like that every fight feels winnable no matter what choices I made.

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The combat is fine, but the real star here is the story. I am legitimately shocked by how effective the narrative is, especially when it comes to the voice acting. Every single member of the cast understands what kind of game they are in and hit the notes that are expected of them. The writing, while a little crass at times, is also better than it has any right to be. It picks and chooses elements from a number of crime thrillers, but executes them well and kept me excited to see what happens next. I especially like that the game offers multiple paths and endings, each with a conclusion that will leave you satisfied.

The story is also more mature than you might expect, and not just when it comes to the violence. It's always a little jarring to see full-frontal nudity pop up on a Nintendo console, but Metropolis doesn't shy away from strip clubs and graphic sex. It sets the tone early that the developer is taking the subject matter seriously, and so should you.

That said, there are a number of things that remind me that we're dealing with a first-time developer. I had this problem where the board would stop dropping new pieces and my cursor would disappear. I also found it annoying that our hero could lose, even after he had successfully beaten his opponent. That's just wrong. And since we're on the subject, why isn't there a continue option when you lose a battle? Having to go back out to the main menu, select the save and go through the cinema again seems pointless when you should be able to just click continue to restart the fight.

While not as long or involved as Puzzle Quest, Metropolis: Lux Obscura takes the basic formula and turns it into one of the year's most compelling crime thrillers. The fast-paced match-three gameplay is only made better by a gripping story that offers multiple paths and endings. It's occasionally buggy and the game could use a little more polishing, but if Metropolis is anything to go on, Ktulhu Solutions has a bright future ahead of them.