When I attended PAX East this last winter, I wrote up a list of 10 must-play indies that were showcased and had grabbed my attention. Lunarium ranked number 6. The opportunity came along to play it for review and I jumped at it, excited to see how things had developed since playing the demo on a busy showroom floor. I had described Lunarium as a game that “felt incredible to play, with razor-sharp scope in its level design” and “tight combat, immensely satisfying parries, and a tough-as-nails final boss.” There’s a lot there that holds true after playing the full game, but I notice now what I couldn’t really assess in the demo.
What I didn’t grasp in my initial time playing the game was the story. The demo shone brightly with its combat, and the spats throughout the game still are tight and satisfying, but the story begins slowly, awkwardly, before ramping up exponentially toward the finale.
Playing as Ave, a young knight (in training?) with something to prove (what? To whom?), you are out exploring the wilderness outside your town, Firleaves. Personality rather than exposition carries the bulk of the opening moments. In your eventual discovery of a sludge that bubbles with orange and purple glows, you also encounter another young woman. She’s pale, with long, flowering white hair and a fair countenance. This is Lune, a Starfarer, and the story will hinge on the budding friendship between her and Ave for the majority of the narrative. The duo has the straight-laced Lune and the brash Ave work together to understand the origin of the Nihilus—this is the sludge—for a long time in a story that meanders through new worlds and characters that have light development.
In the review copy of the game, a significant portion of the dialogue was missing. Placeholder text dominated a few key conversations, and I was left guessing. Quickly, I stopped investing much thought. Despite the missing text, most dialogue was bloated with banter, and I imagine most of it was stuff I would have thumbed my way past regardless.
It’s a tough narrative to predict. This isn’t always bad, but there’s a line between drawing a player through with a carrot on a stick and leaving them in the fog. In Lunarium, it was a strange narrative progression that ultimately felt choppy and lost me in the finer, and well, coarser details too. You start in Firleaves, but then go to the Cyanstone (where the demo takes place) and then on to a few more locations before any of it will click. It had the cadence of a multiversal story without any real anchor point to keep narrative bits from floating away. Lunarium didn’t really bring all that much to the table through acts 1 and 2. At its close, it far too quickly assembles the disparate puzzle pieces you’ve found into a complete picture.
There’s good introspection and thoughtful intellectual exploration on the role of gods. So rather than just gritting your teeth and deciding that god must die, like at the close of too many other games engaging with these themes, Lunarium questions what the relationship between faith, the faithful, and the worshipped is. I found my muted ears opening as the game started to wax poetic and came away pleased with some morsels to chew on.
My narrative misgivings aside, I am happy to report that the demo represented combat well in the full game. Parries are satisfying, combat is tight, but bosses are not always tough-as-nails, and it’s all much more methodical than I remember.
The fundamentals form a strong foundation for your abilities, which maybe matters more than anything else in an action game. You’re equipped with the sword Junonia, a single dash, and a block that can be timed for a perfect parry. Everything is immediately responsive. With no stamina meter, you’re only limited by the amount of dashes you can chain together. This makes for slower, more deliberate fights in the early game. Lune provides the occasional passive arrow to help in battles. While you never play as Lune, her skills will build a posture meter on enemies, much like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. You have a currency called Resonance that will accrue passively through your strikes that are spent in combat to activate Lune’s attacks.
It’s refreshingly simple with enough variation in it to allow for experimentation and buildcrafting. I ended up attaching my passive abilities and Lune skills to when I used a Prayer, the name for a healing draught. Each time I would heal, I gained two Resonance, an attack boost, and additional health. Paired with Lune’s skills and equipment that increased attack at the cost of a lot of Resonance, I found myself taunting bosses to hit me and then unleashing hell upon them with a spinning sword attack, sometimes filling their posture meter over halfway in a single assault.
A few bosses crumbled under this strategy. Ave is surprisingly bulky for having such a small health meter, so I found that health boosts aren’t nearly as helpful as raw strength. Bosses can still be challenging and require careful planning sessions between attempts to defeat, but I didn’t find any particular walls. In fact I found the opposite, in which I broke some bosses before their second phase could even begin. I don’t consider myself a “gamer,” especially when it comes to Soulslikes, so don’t read too much into this. It was less of a skill thing and more of an imbalance in boss design.
Bosses themselves, health and stagger meters being what they are, are dope as heck. Their design, movesets, arenas, etc. all fit the bill for the genre. I was excited whenever a new one would strut on to the screen, and each fight was a spectacle. As I continued throughout the game, the complexity increased, and I had to trust myself and my build to get into the rhythmic trance when locking into boss fights, which were always a visual delight. Both major bosses in Cyanstone displayed the lost elegance that FromSoftware weaves into their characters. The milky pearl armor offset by the Nihilus pollutant seeping out of their limbs set the mood for a desperate struggle. Their attack animations reflected the same determination despite weariness. It made for moments that I wish had equally exciting narratives coupled with the bosses.
The isometric view combined with neutral tones makes it especially easy to see what you’re up against. I’ve found in Soulslikes that if the screen gets cluttered with too many warnings blaring, then suddenly it feels like you’re fighting everything in a room other than the boss. Lunarium avoids this issue by emphasizing detail only where it matters. Floors and pathways aren’t heavily textured, and frankly, there isn’t all that much to look at. It’s a surprisingly claustrophobic game. However, there still is much beauty in the character portraits, level design, and animations.
But the minimalism is a worthy sacrifice to make combat clear. Telegraphing attacks, parry cues, and other flourishes are displayed easily and in discernible patterns. No chains of feints before a blow finally connects. Just pay attention, don’t get greedy, get your hits in.
Lunarium plays well enough. I don’t feel deceived or even disappointed by the final product based on my enjoyment of the demo. Rather, what I see here is the potential from a studio to make a wonderful follow-up. Many swings were taken, and not all of them connected, but the bones of Lunarium make for twinkling brilliance that can someday radiate into a full sun.
