Guide a boy and his companion through an ancient tower filled with beautiful visuals and clever point-and-click puzzles.
LUNA The Shadow Dust
Developer: Lantern Studio
Price: $20
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Mac, Linux
MonsterVine was provided a PC code for review.
LUNA The Shadow Dust puts you in the role of a young boy who falls from the top of a tall tower and then begins climbing back up, crossing through room after room of puzzles that must be solved to progress to the next section of the tower. He’s soon joined by a cat-like creature that becomes his companion as he climbs from floor to floor.
It’s a point-and-click adventure game, but the puzzles aren’t inventory-based like many in the genre are. Instead, each room of the tower is a separate, self-contained area with a central puzzle you must solve in order to proceed. Once the companion character joins you, you can switch between them at will and use their skills together in order to solve each puzzle. These puzzles range from something as simple as matching symbols, to using the boy to create shadows for your companion to climb on as makeshift platforms, to a few truly challenging puzzles that require you to figure out how each piece of the room works in order to proceed. While the later rooms become difficult and more complex, they’re the sort of puzzles that make you feel smart when you finally solve them.
For the most part, LUNA has a linear progression. You finish one room and move on to the next, with a map of the tower showing your progress and current location. It only takes a few hours to reach the end. However, there are some secrets to discover within those rooms, including one that is particularly well-hidden. The tower map allows you to replay any completed level whenever you want, although you can’t skip cutscenes, causing some frustration if you decide to replay a level that includes one of the surprisingly lengthy cinematics.
LUNA has entirely wordless storytelling without a single line of dialogue. While you might expect such a game to make use of cues in the environment to convey its storytelling–and there is a little of that–it instead tells most of its story through a handful of animated cutscenes. In some ways, this makes the story much more direct, but at the same time, these lengthy wordless scenes left me wishing for just a little more context. I finished the story knowing what had happened, but not necessarily why.
Even when I didn’t understand the storytelling, however, I still appreciated it. LUNA The Shadow Dust is a beautiful game. The music is excellent and the cutscenes are gorgeous, and I felt the bond between the two characters primarily because of how well the cinematics conveyed their emotions. Many of the puzzles make use of light and darkness, and the entire experience has a fairytale-like quality to it.
The Final Word
While its storytelling might leave you with questions, LUNA The Shadow Dust is a beautiful game with some truly clever and challenging puzzles.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
