Lil' Guardsman

Lil' Guardsman is a deduction adventure where you play Lil, a 12-year-old unexpectedly in charge of the guard shed at the castle gate of the Sprawl, covering her dad's shift. Over 100 unique characters — humans, elves, goblins, cyclopes, other fantasy creatures — arrive at the gate, and your job is to decide who to admit, who to deny, who to send to jail, and (occasionally, inadvertently) who to zap into smithereens.

The interrogation system uses your powers of deduction. Question each visitor, deploy your trusty toolkit (which you upgrade with gold earned across shifts), and read their responses for inconsistencies that determine whether they belong inside or not. Sending the wrong creature through changes who's safe and who's not in the kingdom — your decisions accumulate into a larger story across a royal wedding, two competing kingdoms vying for alliance, and a siege launched by whoever you anger in the process.

The full cast is voiced. The Chronometer3000 lets you go back and replay scenes for higher scores, with the caveat that breaking space and time too aggressively may have consequences. The combination of deduction, narrative, and puzzle-solving carries the campaign across a series of fully voiced encounters, and the game's tonal hook is the contrast between a 12-year-old's perspective and the very adult kingdom-shaping decisions she's being asked to make.