So I just finished last night. Wow, this was a pain. It wasn't just that the puzzles were difficult. There were a bunch of control issues and design choices that made everything a challenge. For starters: picking up and interacting with objects. I mentioned this before, but objects are scattered all over the place surround by other objects that you can't take, so finding things is a matter of clicking around until you pick up something you need. The cursor does change color slightly when you are over an object, but it is so subtle that it was easier just clicking around. Scenes will also have random levers and wheels that are just part of the artwork and you can't interact with. This is further complicated by the fact that there are some levers that also look useless,
until you activate them from somewhere else. Navigation was also a problem. The cursor seems to do what it wants and I found myself hunting for the proper location to go the direction that I wanted. Scene transitions left me wondering where I was in relation to the previous scene. Sometimes directions you can travel are hidden. In one case, there was a hallway with a another hallway to the side. Only you can't actually see the side hallway in the artwork. You have to float the cursor over and have it turn into a turn arrow. Surprise! Hallway. In another case, I was in a tower that had two doors. For some reason, the second door could only be seen from a particular place in the room. The other door can been seen in several locations. It took me a while to even figure out the second door existed. Even after I discovered it, I had to hunt around to find the right location to get to it. To put it bluntly: I got lost in a small, circular room.
It's impossible not to draw comparisons to Myst. Myst stuck with one gameplay mechanic: puzzles. Adding inventory items just complicates things. Where Myst was bright and colorful, everything in Lighthouse is drab. This makes the aforementioned item hunting that much more difficult. There were also times I just wasn't sure what I was looking at. Myst also clued you in on important things by zooming in when necessary. And where the puzzles in Myst followed a certain logic, I just didn't get that from Lighthouse. A lot of times I found myself stuck simply because "Oh, you can move the lever in another direction" or something. The plot of Lighthouse was fine I guess, but I don't think it's really too necessary for a game like this. Myst, for the most part, barely had one.
So that pretty much wraps things up. Other observations:
You don't give a baby milk from a refrigerator! (Even scary babies. Yeah, the CGI did not age well.)
In one location, there's a windmill that drives a gear. You use it to power a drive shaft. But the animation shows the shafting moving in the wrong direction relative to the gear. They are both moving clockwise.
The protagonist is very... bold. Enters an interdimensional portal, uses strange flying contraptions, pilots a sub, makes a bomb, electrocutes people... that she is trying to help.
Spoken in the final scene by the professor: "I couldn't have defeated the Dark Being without your help."
I couldn't have defeated..? Help? HELP! What did he do? It's like being in a hospital waiting room and saying to a surgeon "I couldn't have done the surgery without your help." He was strapped to a chair the whole time!
So next up is a playthrough with the aid of a walkthrough and maybe find some alternate endings, though I think I know what some of them are already. As promised, here's a file with my saves.
