Hollow Lantern

Hollow Lantern grabbed me with its mood before anything else. It's a side-scrolling adventure where you guide a lamplighter through a town swallowed by fog, solving environmental puzzles and piecing together what happened here.

The puzzles are the environmental kind — rotate a mirror, redirect light, find the right order to pull a set of levers. Nothing felt unfair, and the game trusts you to notice details rather than slapping arrows everywhere. The hand-drawn backgrounds do a lot of storytelling on their own.

It runs offline from start to finish and took me about four evenings to complete. If you like slow, atmospheric games where you actually read the scenery, this one's a treat.

What we liked

• Gorgeous hand-drawn atmosphere
• Fair, satisfying light-based puzzles
• Complete story playable offline