Genre: Point-And-Click Adventure 
Release date: November 1, 2013

One of the first things they teach you in Creative Writing class is that you must have conflict to make your story interesting. Point taken, but I never understood why the conflict had to be between people. The common technique is to create a Bad Guy whose mission in life is to make your life miserable – the Evil Villain consumed by greed or the Soap Opera Biatch who gets her rocks off from making other people miserable. You are likely to end up hating these people (and what sort of karma/sin have you committed by wanting to see a fictional person killed?)

There are plenty of ways of creating conflict without putting people at loggerheads. Your space ship crash lands on a deserted planet. How do you survive and escape? Or, how do you overcome technical hurdles to create that new invention? Or, how do you save the populace from the ravaging plague?

So when a game comes out which has an engaging quest, but no Bad Guy to make me think the bad thoughts, I am immediately sold.

Lilly Looking Through begins when the magic cloth blows through the village. It touches, and thus enchants, several items before wrapping itself around Lilly’s younger brother and whisking him away. Lilly, an innocent eight-year-old girl, runs after to rescue him.

There are many impediments Lilly must overcome to reach her brother – streams and canyons to cross, doors to unlock, the usual. But to help her along she has a pair of goggles which were enchanted by the cloth. When she puts them on and looks through them she is taken back in time. Removing them brings her back to the present. So say she comes across a broken bridge. She puts the goggles on and is transported back to when the bridge was new. She can then cross and remove the goggles.

Most of the puzzles are easy to medium in difficulty. But there are a couple of difficult ones towards the end which involve the mixing of colored lights. I wasn’t sure what was intended there and had to resort to a walkthrough. Even with the answer in hand I wasn’t sure how it worked, but that was just a mild irritant which I was willing to forgive.

The game play itself is point-and-click with every movement and action a pre-rendered animation. The style is old school cartoon. But what truly makes this game delightful is Lilly herself. She doesn’t have an attitude. She doesn’t appear to have any issues. She is just your perfect little eight-year-old. And she manages to do it without pretension or being overly cute. This is a very difficult personality to convey and the developers are to be commended.

The bottom line is that I really enjoyed playing this game. The developers took a very difficult genre – childhood innocence – and implemented it perfectly. It left me with a smile on my face, a feeling of satisfaction and a desire for more.

+ Delightful, peaceful, engaging game play + Most puzzles are logical and satisfying + Leaves you with a smile and wanting more