I'll level with you: for a good long while I absolutely despised The Lamplighters League; approximately one half of it is clumsy, clunky, often deeply annoying, and dubiously conceived. For all that, though, I've become oddly quite fond of its weird mishmash of real-time stealth and heavily XCOM-inspired turn-based action, even if I'm not exactly sure it ever entirely rises above its litany of flaws.
But first, welcome to an alternate-history 1930s, where the suits are sharp, the dames are tough, and an occult-obsessed cabal is gathering an army to bring about the end of the world. It's a set-up that's pure 1930s pulp, The Lamplighters League's gorgeously evocative art style and sultry, swinging soundtrack perfectly capturing the globetrotting, rip-roaring spirit of the classic adventure genre in its heyday. There's a little bit of everything here – Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Raymond Chandler, a big old chunk of H. P. Lovecraft, a wink to Indiana Jones – and The Lamplighters League doesn't miss a beat as its loveable cast of wisecracking rogues gleefully leaps between moonlit cobbled streets, vine-strangled temples, dank swamps, arid deserts, snowy highlands, and tropical island hideouts as it works to halt the apocalyptic designs of the Banished Court.
All this plays out across a world map perpetually plastered with missions, some of which are core to progressing The Lamplighters League's steadily mounting tale of occult mayhem, others a ceaseless procession of considerably less narratively engaging busywork, procedurally assembled from a randomised mix of pre-made maps, enemy placements, and objectives. Tackling the latter rewards valuable resources used to improve your field equipment and, more importantly, prevents their threat level from being added to three ever-looming doom tracks, each one representing the progress of the Court's three formidable Scions. Fail to keep doom under control and you'll be forced to deal with more challenging mission parameters once certain thresholds are met, culminating in a game-ending apocalypse. It's a system of high-pressure plate juggling that forces some tough decisions between missions and helps maintain tension throughout, but its endless whack-a-mole structure can also feel a little wearying when all you want is some breathing space to do the next core mission - even if the threat of dire consequences is never quite as punitive as the game would have you believe.