Daumier: Lila & Ghost Impressions – Good Premise, Bewildering Result

Halfway through the second chapter of Daumier: Lila & Ghost, I stopped, looked around, and said “What the hell are we doing?”

I was playing as Lila and my UploadVR colleague, Mike, was playing as Ghost, and together we’d spent the previous hour working our way through the cooperative puzzle game’s unwieldy two-player puzzles. We’d manipulated odd dials to free a caged prisoner, dunked a strange seed into a bucket of water to destroy a punitive pyre and postpone the church’s ability to burn a man at the stake. Now, I was staring at a caterpillar.

This fragmented and seemingly dissonant range of activities speaks to the bigger problems in Daumier. The entire game is confused, lacking logic and cohesion, and at times, it feels like it was designed by five or six people who never once talked to each other.

But let’s get back to the caterpillar puzzle.

We were standing in a garden where three painters were painting a woman under the tutelage of their master, “Vinci.” I don’t really know why, nor how this was connected to the first chapter’s plague-ridden medieval city and its bloody, torturous ending, but swathes of NPC-delivered exposition between chapters did hint at… some connection, possibly involving vampires.

But anyway, there we were in the garden, where we soon learned that Mike (Ghost) had the power to advance and rewind the seasons so that a tree in the center of the garden would pass through its cycles; green vines in spring, fruits in summer, golden leaves in fall, and barren boughs in winter.

Running through the cycle caused a leaf to fall (this leaf was oddly enormous), which I was able to successfully feed to the caterpillar. Once full of leaf, the caterpillar could be made to form a chrysalis through Mike’s advancement of the seasons once more. Back to spring, and the caterpillar emerged from its silken bed a beautiful butterfly. That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that at some point during all of this “gameplay,” two shimmering orbs of liquid light had materialized at the edge of the garden. I couldn’t approach them, (because the game doesn’t allow you to move freely in its world, rather only to teleport points), and I couldn’t interact with them in any way. I didn’t know then, nor now, what these two shimmering balls of light were, where they came from, or what their significance was, if any. But once hatched, the butterfly flew over and hovered around them.

Okay. Now what?

I fumble-bumbled around a bit, teleporting back and forth between the few teleport points available to me, while Mike “Hmm-ed and Umm-ed” over a solution. After a few minutes, the only real action that was available to me or him was that I could pick up the leaf, which the caterpillar had earlier chewed a hole through. Okay, what’s the point of that. I fumbled a bit longer, until for no memorable reason, I held the leaf up to my face and realized, “I can look through this hole.”

But why would I ever do that? For what reason on earth or in heaven would I ever look through a hole in a leaf, and what would ever make me consider that doing so would generate any sort of response from anyone or anything in this or any other universe? Nevertheless, for lack of anything else to do, I peered through the leaf hole and said, “Uh, Mike, I can look at stuff through this le-,” and stopped dead.

I’d pointed my leaf mask at the orbs of shimmering light (remember those?), and immediately the puzzle was solved. The scene changed, and we moved on to the next riveting puzzle.

Mike was confused. “Wait, what happened? How did you do it?”

I replied with confidence. “Well, obviously, Mike, I looked at those balls of light through the leaf hole the caterpillar had chewed.”

“Ah,” he said. “I see.”

But he didn’t see! And neither did I.

After our two hour play session, Mike and I agreed that the puzzles (and overall gameplay and presentation, too) in Daumier: Lila & Ghost are undercooked and unintuitive. While the game has a good central premise, that being “Solve co-operative puzzles with your friend by using communication and your brains,” the execution falls far short. The narrative and story didn’t sufficiently motivate me to keep going, either. It was convoluted, presented in a disengaged way, and felt dark and unappealing.

Too many of the game’s puzzles involve one partner finding a solution while the other stands there waiting. And while some puzzles do indeed require actual communication and teamwork, none of the ones we encountered ever felt truly wondrous, like we’d done something cool, or interesting, or smart, or fun.

The physical puzzles are finicky and rough. Manipulating objects in the game spaces often works, but just as often it feels tricky and annoying. Animations are subpar, subtitles have typos, and the voice acting bounces between stilted and grandiose caricature which the House of the Dead 2 fan in me appreciates in a way. Gameplay mechanics are never explained (indeed, the game’s hint system and an ephemeral paintbrush that can be used to communicate were only discovered via random button-pressing), and movement and exploration are virtually nonexistent due to the game’s forced teleportation system.

It never feels good to be harshly critical of a game. I like the idea of Daumier: Lila & Ghost, and some of the puzzles Mike and I encountered were interesting to experience. But I can’t say they were interesting in the way that puzzles in Zelda or MYST are interesting. In games like those and other great puzzle games, the puzzles make you feel clever and reward you for working through them. Daumier’s puzzles just make me feel confused and slightly bored. For a puzzle game, that’s not good.

Daumier: Lila & Ghost is available now on Quest, and those who buy it in the first month of release will get a free copy for a friend after joining the developer’s Discord server.