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ABANDONED: Lumin's Path
Mar. 14th, 2020 06:19 pmThis one is unfortunate, because it was the first game that really gave Ardei an "ooh this looks good, I want us to play this" feeling. All three of us really wanted it to work out, and on at least a few levels, it did! But, well...
Lumin's Path is a student project by a team with no prior development experience, who made this game as part of their classwork, and it... kind of shows. There are some big ideas in here. This game is both graphically and especially musically gorgeous. We had to watch the trailer more than once when we saw this in our Steam Discovery Queue just because the song was so beautiful and soothing that we just wanted to hear it again. It has an absolute mountain of great things going for it, and then it... stumbles in execution.
You are a robot with a light that can be turned off and on at will. The environment reacts accordingly: some vines block your way when it's dark, and you need to shine your light so they recede. Other vines block your way when it's light, and you need to turn your light off so they recede. (The tutorial confusingly claims these ones are attracted to your light and that they "may help," which is completely untrue.) Some floating platforms are only solid when lit, others only when not lit. These elements are all creatively arranged to make jumping segments and such. Watch the trailer and you'll get the basic idea.
A PS2-looking 3D platformer such as this tends to live or die based on its movement and object physics, though, and that is this game's biggest weakness. Your robot will fall off of giant vines that are supposed to be platforms but somehow register as slopes. It will mysteriously stop running when it encounters invisible walls and other forms of wonky object collision. It will get stuck inside things. Don't even get me started on the camera.
This game is not very long, a mere three stages (each of which have secret collectible gems,) and it's free. And I already said this before but it bears repeating: it's gorgeous. The premise and ideas are clever, every screenshot is a work of art, the soundtrack is so charming that I really want it to exist on someone's Bandcamp page or something somewhere. (Seriously, the music is fantastic, can we please get a soundtrack release?) But after finishing the first stage with 100% completion and finishing the second with 3/4 gems (overall progress which took about 70 minutes according to our gameplay stats, but I assure you that at least 20 of them were spent trying to get the gem in the starting room which appears to have been masterfully hidden within an actual labyrinth of invisible force field-like object collision glitches) I just got tired of fighting this game's actual gameplay. I want so badly to like it, but at the end of the day it simply won't let us.
Lumin's Path is a student project by a team with no prior development experience, who made this game as part of their classwork, and it... kind of shows. There are some big ideas in here. This game is both graphically and especially musically gorgeous. We had to watch the trailer more than once when we saw this in our Steam Discovery Queue just because the song was so beautiful and soothing that we just wanted to hear it again. It has an absolute mountain of great things going for it, and then it... stumbles in execution.
You are a robot with a light that can be turned off and on at will. The environment reacts accordingly: some vines block your way when it's dark, and you need to shine your light so they recede. Other vines block your way when it's light, and you need to turn your light off so they recede. (The tutorial confusingly claims these ones are attracted to your light and that they "may help," which is completely untrue.) Some floating platforms are only solid when lit, others only when not lit. These elements are all creatively arranged to make jumping segments and such. Watch the trailer and you'll get the basic idea.
A PS2-looking 3D platformer such as this tends to live or die based on its movement and object physics, though, and that is this game's biggest weakness. Your robot will fall off of giant vines that are supposed to be platforms but somehow register as slopes. It will mysteriously stop running when it encounters invisible walls and other forms of wonky object collision. It will get stuck inside things. Don't even get me started on the camera.
This game is not very long, a mere three stages (each of which have secret collectible gems,) and it's free. And I already said this before but it bears repeating: it's gorgeous. The premise and ideas are clever, every screenshot is a work of art, the soundtrack is so charming that I really want it to exist on someone's Bandcamp page or something somewhere. (Seriously, the music is fantastic, can we please get a soundtrack release?) But after finishing the first stage with 100% completion and finishing the second with 3/4 gems (overall progress which took about 70 minutes according to our gameplay stats, but I assure you that at least 20 of them were spent trying to get the gem in the starting room which appears to have been masterfully hidden within an actual labyrinth of invisible force field-like object collision glitches) I just got tired of fighting this game's actual gameplay. I want so badly to like it, but at the end of the day it simply won't let us.