 Hello friends, Philip Magnus here and today I'll tell you why you should be playing Lil Guardsman. Lil Guardsman takes the core concept of Papis Please and places it in an irreverent, colourful setting that oozes with charm in an endless amount of humour. If protagonist Lil, short for Lilit, was just a sarcastic little imp, it would not have worked as well as it does. But because she has heart, because the whole of Lil Guardsman has heart in spades, this game turns into one of the most earnest games I have played. It's taken as its total inspirations, such beloved LucasArts classics as Monkey Island Grim Fandango. Wait, was that LucasArts 1? I'm sure it doesn't matter. I come from a late generation and so I haven't played those classics, but from what I know about their sharpest nails writing, Hildop Studios' game will do those 90s titles proud. Humour is, of course, subjective. What is funny to me doesn't have to be funny to you, yet there are some rules to comedy writing and Lil Guardsman keeps with them, to produce a staggering amount of laugh out loud situations. Comedy works by juxtaposing what is normal with what is ludicrous. And from the get-go, the setup is ridiculous. Your dad can't make it to work today because he's gone to bet all your money on the latest Goblin Ball game down at the hole and you, a 12-year-old girl, have to stand in for him at work. It's not like you've ever substituted for a Shamish either, it's ridiculous, and you know it, and those travellers who come through the gates know it, and all of you acknowledge it. That's the first stroke of brilliance, the second is, after a single shift it becomes clear to everyone you're doing Shamish's job better than he is. And because you're a prepubescent girl, the trio of nutty counsellors in charge of the sprawl the city you live in decide to make your position permanent, because they think they can push you around to look the other way whenever it suits them. Boy, they're about to be disappointed. Oh, and did I mention, an archaeologist gives you a time machine to prototype under extremely specific conditions that have to do with your guard duties? Yeah, I didn't think I had. But it does happen, shockingly, on day one. Quite the luck Lil has. I will say a little more about the plot in a minute, but first, a few more thoughts on the comedic writing. Bad humour punches down, good humour punches up. Not in every occasion, but that's usually how it goes. In this respect, the most common targets Lil Garzman picks are Disney and the heavy hitting archetypes of the fantasy genre. The cast includes an impressive array of memorable and colourful characters, all of whom you will have to decide whether to let into the sprawl or not. A few personal standouts include an ancient wizard who is a cross between Gandalf Merlin and the dudes from the Big Lebarski. A real in-the-flesh singing Disney Princess, those red splatters in her sleeves. I'm sure it's just paint. Two goblins in a trench coat and an elderly capitalist. Not one of these characters is played all the way straight. There is always a twist, always the unexpected clues to be found, or the most ridiculous dialogue lines suddenly injected into the conversation. What Lil Garzman does is, it places the unexpected onto a pedestal and it makes sure that there's so much of it to always thrill, to always surprises. And all of us players benefit enormously from it. The game markets itself as having over a hundred memorable characters whose fate you can decide. Before playing it, I would have taught this hyperbolic. To finishing Lil Garzman, I know it to be the barefaced truth. The world building offers no small amount of opportunities for fun jokes either. This is your typical fantasy society that has found a fantastic energy source which has allowed its technological development to coincide with, shall we say, 80s, 90s tech. TVs and radios are both widely circulated. While cellular phones are nowhere to be seen. Jukeboxes, stationary phones, metal detectors and x-rays, most of these have some role in Lil's daily work and there is an undercurrent of very easily recognizable American pop culture on display here, which is gently, or not so gently, sometimes with a blunt war hammer satirized by the game. And it's wonderful, simply wonderful. Two of the shifts you will work are night shifts, which it turns out are hilarious fun and a nice change of pace from the 10 or so day shifts. Night is when lots of the world's more monstrous inhabitants try to sneak into the sprawl. Some are merely trying to get by and a livelihood. Others want to go on a killing rampage, as you'll want to do at night, or hope to feast on the citizens, or are roils in disguise trying to sneak back home after disappearing for days and end with no explanation, or, well, all I'm saying is, the game likes to throw plenty of interesting situations at you. And there are some hilarious ways you can end up dying. If you need any more reason to play this, which you shouldn't, like trying to relieve a barbarian warrior from her swords, or being malty with a dragon. Also, there's a, oh, I just remembered one that's particularly good, a witch. Keep an eye out for witches, they're a fun lot, is all I'm gonna say. The dying screens are implicit, though. A text message with a game over, a screen, and a prompt inviting you to retry the encounter. But they're very funny. You kind of don't expect that this game would let you die at all, and then it happens and the game knows that you didn't expect it, and it's like, oh, I bet you didn't think of that, so it's, it's got cheek this game, gotta respect that. The game doesn't have too much in the way of expressions and fancy animations, but the expressions that you do have are so bloody expressive, hilarious too. Like every single frame of Lil is just perfect. It's no issue whatever that the animations are a dime a dozen, as every character is voiced to perfection, with every actor offering genuinely excellent performances, you will catch now and then actors performing several roles at once, but each one has a spin to it. It doesn't at any point take you from, you know, in the actual fantasy of it. The only moment of frustration and it's a small one I had with the presentation has to do with the occasional error, whether a typo or a mistaken conjugation or an erroneous apostrophe, and some of them sneak into the voice acting on a few occasions. That is nothing short of a shame. I wish, badly, that I could have proofread for this game. Hell, I actually would have loved to write for this game. Okay, but how does Lil Guardian work? Again, I did it. Why do I keep calling it that, Lil Guardsman? To begin with, you are deciding who to let into the sprawl and who to keep out. Later on, a third option gets unlocked and you can send people to jail. Still later, you end up with a secondary task to decide who to enlist for the sprawl's military and who to turn away. Since you're a hard-working girl and you don't have a whole day to spare on just one traveller, there's an order to things. You've got three actions to work out people's motives. You can do so variously through the use of your five tools by calling one of the three councillors or simply by interrogating the visitor in a high or low stakes dialogue. Your time machine allows you to rewind and try a new if you mess up one of the situationships you enter into whenever a person tries to walk through the sprawl's bloody door. There are also a few occasions in which you can use one of a few items to resolve a particularly tricky situation. You know, if interrogating the visitor in a high or low stakes dialogue doesn't work. My absolute favourite situation sees you hand over a bag of rice to the most obvious vampire in the universe, which allows you to lean back for the rest of the night and enjoy your shift while he sculpts in the shadows, counting every single grain of rice. The five tools you've got access to are a whip, which is great when you need to scare someone out of their wit, a truth potion, which forces people to spill their innermost thoughts and forget that they've done so, an x-ray machine, which is, well, pretty self-explanatory, a metal detector, which is, likewise, and a really cool decoder ring, which helps you decipher everything weird and unintelligible you come across. The counsellors are Ash, the real politicking heavy hitter who's been overdoing it with the racist potions, really lady, stop drinking the kool-aid, the military veteran striker who sees the world in strict black and white collars, but I found strangely endearing probably because of her haircut, and Malcolm, the clown who loves chaos and might in fact be the most helpful of the lot. There are quite the characters, these three, of them making for an excellent, if occasionally antagonistic, support cast. A real standout has to be the elderly Spaniard gentleman who is on a spirit quest to find a hat as fantastical as the one he lost some time ago. His repeat appearances, with all manner of cats, became a favourite audiovisual gag, and effortlessly so. He keeps saying, this hat, it is not as fantastical as my previous hat, my journey continues. I know these words because I have heard them said out loud ten bloody times by now, which I love, absolutely adore it. This hat, it is not as fantastic as my previous hat, my journey, it continues. My point, with a lot of this review is really something I've been building up to, your choices matter, what you do, who you help, who you stop, who you jail, who you enlist, who you forbid from enlisting, even the kind of places you decide to go in your downtime, it all matters. Getting the full four stars is great fun, yes, there's a star system whenever you decide to welcome one of the sprawls gorgeous visitors, or turn them away. But it's not the only way you can play this chasing after the full score of every encounter. I got the best ending achievement because by day four or five I'd figured out how to get to the truth by my second try at the latest, but there are other endings too, and I'm certain that many of them are hilarious, hilarious enough to play through the game again, maybe not immediately, but once the jokes begin to fade from my mind, I am certain that I will be back to replay Lil Guardsman in no time. There's definitely a mean Lil playthrough you can do if you set your mind to it, even till I hate the idea of Lil being something other than the adorable rascal with the heart of gold that I play Thera's, I'm too curious not to see how that more mischievous playthrough looks. What is also remarkable about Lil Guardsman is, at no point does this title dissolve into just a series of running gags. It could have, and I bet the temptation was hard to resist, but it tells a compelling story, whose plot is a little disconnected at times, perhaps, but only if you're not paying attention. If you keep an eye out, really work on getting those four star scores for most everyone who comes by your guardhouse, you will find yourself one of the central pieces in a narrative of surprisingly high stakes, with a villain you do really want to punch in his smug kisser. With that in mind, I can do nothing more than absolutely and heartily recommend to you, Lil Guardsman, go play it, have fun with it, I think you'll love it, I know I did. And until I find something else that I love or hate, I'm Philip Magnus, please don't forget to share this video with your friends, subscribe to this channel, smash the like button and do all the other YouTubey things. I'm Philip Magnus, you're not, I'll see you again next time for something exciting, one supposes. Bye!