The Lamplighter's League has a 78% positive rating on Steam, and a 75 average score on Metacritic. Some of the criticism that keeps this game from higher scores is well deserved, especially the incompatibility with the Game Pass cloud save system is a real bother, and the transition between the real-time part and the turn-based part can easily go wrong (at which point I usually reload). But another part of the criticism is about randomness, and how players deal with it.

Imagine you would make a survey of 1,000 players of Baldur's Gate 3 and ask them all which was their hardest fight in Act I of the game. You would get a rather short list, with most players probably choosing the hag or the spectator. While you have a good amount of choice on how to set up your party in Baldur's Gate 3, all the battles are set piece, and some are simply harder than others. You might get a splatter of "emergent" situations when you decided to not rest and then a medium difficulty fight turns quite hard. But on your second playthrough that wouldn't happen anymore, because you know where the challenges are. This works well enough for Baldur's Gate 3: A single playthrough is long enough that replayability isn't your prime concern. And by setting up every fight manually, the devs made sure that different party compositions work, and different classes get to shine.

If you move from Baldur's Gate 3 to The Lamplighter's League, that manual set up is missing. Instead there is a lot of randomness, and that randomness can work for you or against you. If you have a preferred strategy, a random combination of factors can make it not viable. There are situations where your assassin simply can't sneak up to somebody and stab him in the back, because there are too many enemies around. But in another situation you might face a group of melee enemies only which are quite handicapped by the layout of the land, having to move through an oil spill to get to you, which you can then use to your advantage and set on fire. And much of that is random. If you go back to your last hideout save, and select the same mission on the world map, the mission map might be the same or very similar, but the enemies are probably a different mix. Suddenly the guys behind the oil spill are ranged enemies and it is you who is at a disadvantage, having to get to them.

I've seen a lot of people, even professional reviewers, complaining about The Lampligher's League being unfair at times. And I don't consider "unfair" the right word, because it implies some intention. The difficulty curve of The Lamplighter's League has spikes and valleys, and that is a consequence of randomness, not some dev who manually designed the difficulty curve that way. By knowing that it is random, you can get away from the mindset of "the devs designed it this way, so it must be doable with standard tactics". Instead you need to adapt to the random situation, which at least for me is a lot of fun by itself. The enemies grouping up to make your assassin not viable might be the ideal target for Ingrid's real-time rush attack, killing three of them at the same time. Maybe you need to throw a shock mine somewhere, to take out a sentry that would otherwise mess up your plans.

The really important thing is to use recon mode to understand each mission map and each random situation. Your three agents (you can use four only in specific key battles) have a very limited number of those real-time takeout abilities. If a group of enemies is already small, you might simply want to save your takeout abilities, and just kill them in turn-based combat. Then with the saved takeout abilities you can tackle another, much bigger group somewhere else on that map, and cut it down to size before you go into turn-based mode. Clever strategy and resource management can help a lot here. And sometimes you just need to sit and watch for a while, to adapt your strategy to the paths the enemies are walking. And yes, if something goes horribly wrong, a reload might be required. The random situations create puzzles, and sometimes you need to try out different approaches before you find one that works.

I can see how this isn't for everybody and can be quite annoying for some. But for me, there is also a lot of potential fun in that system. I already defeated two scions, the hardest bosses in the game, by first cleverly isolating them from their minions. Yes, in one case that took several attempts, but working it out was of great fun to me. If you expect a smooth game experience, prepared by the devs for you, The Lamplighter's League might not be the game for you. If you like having to change and adapt to random situations, you'll have a much better experience with the game.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:44 AM Permanent Link