In the world of Lil' Guardsman, everyone wants to get through the gates, but not everyone should. Normally, that wouldn't be the problem of the protagonist, Lil, but her gate guard father's gambling habit and general attitude towards work in general means that she's the one left to make the big decisions like, for example, whether to allow the obvious murderer that also happens to have a song in her heart into the bustling city of the Sprawl.
It's a fairly simple, albeit comical, premise. 12-year-old Lil ends up parked at the gate during the day as a cavalcade of potential visitors try to convince her that there's a good reason they should be admitted. Ultimately, you can either let them in or not – or even jail them, eventually.
This is where Lil' Guardsman actually gets complicated, and fast. Determining who should or should not get through the gate is simple in that you just pick a specific lever, but figuring out whether they should is a whole involved puzzle. Do you try and talk with them to better understand who they are and why they want through? What about using one of your various instruments like the Decoder Ring or Truth Spray, which only have so many possible charges? And what does the daily writ, where various odds and ends provide context like for example the jester keeping an eye out for a painter, have to say?
Nun shall pass
While that's the core of the game – letting people in vs. keeping them out – it's the consequences of those actions that really let Lil' Guardsman shine. Dutifully performing your duty accurately earns you a certain amount of gold, but you can also just straight-up fail and cause major problems. Letting someone you shouldn't have slip by can range in terms of consequences, but it can mean something as straightforward as a fixed jukebox or much more dire results.
Exploring around and talking to the folks that have been let through sometimes means new little bits of story or other rewards. In one instance, I confiscated the lucky headband of a visiting goblinball player at the gate, bet on the home team outside the stadium, and then watched the match to reap the benefits of both my bet and then selling the headband to a local shop for a pretty pen… gold. A pretty pile of gold.
If an ever-expanding cast of characters and wildly important decisions make your stomach churn, there's actually an in-game mechanic for redoing the gate interactions. That's right; Lil can time travel. The justification for this is – you know what, I won't ruin it for you. Half the fun of Lil' Guardsman is the writing and the other half is the delivery from the talented voice cast, but suffice it to say that if you completely screw up and light the town on fire, you eventually have the opportunity to give it another go a limited number of times per day.
It's not particularly difficult to follow the patterns of all the little narrative deductive elements in Lil' Guardsman to get to the right (for varying definitions at times) answer, but there are so many different spinning plates in terms of what you can ask, how you can respond, items you can take or use, daily concerns, and so on that keeping all of the possibilities in mind is more complex than it seems at first blush. And that's assuming you're not losing sight of the goal while chuckling at, for example, the pixelated goblin trying to argue for admittance in the parlance of classic adventure games.
I wouldn't go so far as to call Lil' Guardsman moving or dramatic, but the charming art and funny narrative and script combined with the deceptively complex mechanics and surprisingly dense consequences makes for a good time. If you're looking for that, well, look no further. Now if you'll excuse me, there's someone at the gate trying to smuggle fantasy drugs into the castle inside the coffin of a beloved cat that I must attend to.
Lil' Guardsman is out now on PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and Nintendo Switch. To see what other indie gems we've been enjoying, check out our Indie Spotlight series.
