Lilly Looking Through

My first thought watching the opening scene was that somebody had bottled a feeling rather than designed a game. The screen starts almost fully dark, slowly illuminating a small circle around a little girl hopping on all fours next to a frog, and by the time the full scene opens up you are already fond of her. That is not an accident. The animation was handled by Jessica Hoogendyk, a former Hollywood animator, and her husband Steve Hoogendyk directed the whole project as a family undertaking. That love is visible in every idle fidget and rope-climb Lilly performs. The core mechanic is a pair of goggles that toggle between past and present versions of each environment. Slip them on near a lake blocked by boulders and you are suddenly in a time when the water sits lower and the boulders have not yet fallen, clearing your path. Slip them off and the present snaps back. The soundtrack shifts with you, moving from one mood to another as you cross the temporal boundary, which is a small touch that lands harder than it has any right to. There is no inventory to manage; every puzzle is solved by working levers, pressure plates, dials, and the occasional colour-switching mechanism directly in the world. The screen-by-screen structure means each area is its own contained puzzle box, and the difficulty ramps steadily toward something genuinely challenging by the final third. Where the game earns its mixed-to-positive reception rather than a full-throated endorsement is in three persistent weaknesses. First, the story is sparse to the point of near-absence, relying on atmosphere over exposition. That works for the first half but the ending arrives abruptly and without closure, feeling less like a conclusion and more like a prologue to something that never materialised. Second, late-game colour-matching puzzles lean into trial-and-error in a way that clashes with the elegant logic of the goggles mechanic. Third, there is exactly one solution per screen, and if you are not on the designers' wavelength you will be mousing over every pixel until something reacts. The double-click zoom, which most adventure players will trigger by reflex, is a minor but recurring annoyance that blurs the beautiful backgrounds without offering any real advantage. For its intended audience, those caveats are manageable. Patient players, parents gaming with older children, and anyone who gravitates toward the quiet end of the point-and-click spectrum will find the three-to-four hour runtime feels complete rather than short. The art draws comparisons to classic Disney and carries a Miyazaki-adjacent sense of wonder that is rare at any budget level. The voice cast, a real-life sibling pair, brings a naturalness that no professional session recording would have produced. Geeta Games made something genuinely handcrafted here, and even over a decade after release it holds its mood better than most things that launched alongside it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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