This is 3 to 4 hours of dreamy, engaging puzzling.
It is beautifully done, visually and aurally. Hand animated, it
reminded me of an elaborately illustrated child's picture book. A muted
colour palette in no way looks drab – to the contrary, it can be quite
sumptuous. An evocative musical score fills the rooms and accentuates
the feeling of the thing, and ambient sound as you prod and poke about
does the rest. There is no spoken word, which doesn't matter because
nothing is said.
It is essentially escape from a room, each escape putting you in the
next room as you ascend a tower at the edge of... somewhere. A childlike
character is the initial protagonist, having been deposited there by a
floating bubble. Once inside the tower, he/she soon discovers a small
four legged creature who joins the travails. You control both, switching
between them at will, and the combined efforts of both are required to
move on.
Leaving the room you are in simply requires you to unlock the door.
How to do that is the point of the room. You might fiddle with
machinery, manipulate murals, or simply identify a colour pattern. The
rooms got more involved as I went, and while none are terribly hard,
quite a few require some thoughtful puzzling.
Each character has its own skills. The child can pull levers, the “pet”
can enter small spaces. It can also jump on things, including shadows.
Light and shadow plays a part in the bigger picture, and is a very
practical part of some rooms. You might have to manipulate things in the
room to generate the appropriate shade.
While the pet jumps, you simply click in the appropriate spot to make
it happen. There is one (and possibly two) rooms where a bit of timing
is involved, but it isn’t in any way an exercise in dexterity. The pet
also floats and soars in some places, and the child will spend time
outside the rooms, traveling about in a little flying boat.
The best puzzles involve the co-operative efforts of both characters,
and there are many of these. It might simply involve taking the pet
somewhere so that you can view the back of the mechanism you are working
on, or it might be a far more intricate working together, each actively
contributing to the solution. The best was probably the four seasons
puzzle, unique from my perspective, and thoughtfully elegant.
Climbing a lengthy ladder near the end was probably the only thing I
would have tweaked. More an activity than a puzzle, it felt unnecessary.
There is a larger story told primarily through several cinematics.
While I might have missed some of its nuances, it was clear what was
going on, and the lack of any spoken (or read) word mattered not.
Played with the mouse, the game autosaves as you access a new room.
When you come back to the game, you can re-enter that room, or revisit
any of the rooms you have already completed.
I liked LUNA a lot.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-9700k 3.7 GHz
