Sci-Fi is really hitting its stride these days in a post-Cyberpunk World.

While Lacuna isn’t boasting those gorgeous 4K visuals and vast cityscapes to explore at will, there is a gritty, surprisingly solid story resting at the heart of it.

With its distinct pixel art style, Lacuna takes players on an unsettling, dystopian journey with bombs, war, and plenty of cigarettes.

Offering a series of decisions which affect the outcome of your story and relationships with characters, as Neil Conrad you investigate a murder that threatens to shake up the entire universe with its implications.

Using your Cell Phone, hunting for clues, while building towards a variety of different endings, you are essentially playing a point-and-click adventure that’s more like a platformer wth a deeper, fulfilling mystery.

Lacuna’s story is undoubtedly its strong suit, with hard-hitting dialogue adding an unsettling level of tension, some skin-crawling music that adds to the ambience, and a world you can take the time to learn more about through news briefings and optional conversations.

It all works so surprisingly well as a a package, with the story carrying the experience, the game guiding you along easily enough, it’s even affordable and value for its charge.

The game does have some technical limitations, controls can be a bit frustrating and the camera motion slightly jarring. Some characters are also written better than others, with some plots dragging. Especially with the research you sometimes have to get into in order to make progress.

The game also has a weird obsession with smoking which really isn’t needed, whether the world is a post-cancer one or not.

But for a game built by such a small, young studio, it deserves a recommendation, to be commended for what it achieves and how it presents itself.

It tries something different with a genre that has always been associated with a mouse and tries to modernise it in a way that feels comfortable across any platform. To surprisingly solid effect.