Lunacid

游戏内容终会耗尽，你的伙伴终将远离。 在日复一日的枯燥日常中前行，想要逃离却“无处可去”。 关闭游戏的那一刻，本该拥有的情感却被空虚填满—— 说到底，人最害怕的，还是孤独啊..

get lost constantly: the game

Одна из лучших игр, которую доводилось проходить. Не пожалеете, если приобретёте её

I know they're going for an old school look and feel, but as soon as I went to change the controls and a text file was pulled up for me to change them manually I checked out.

I usually don’t have much respect for projects that try to coast almost purely on nostalgia. It was charming back in 2012~2013, when the indie scene was exploding, reviving and refreshing genres that had been dormant for generations with modern and innovative takes, essentially redefining what those genres even meant. Nowadays, not so much. Especially with the irritating amount of studios that have zero creative ambition, simply copy-pasting old franchises and selling them under different names, capitalizing on the original studios’ lack of interest in making their titles easily accessible and on consumers desperate to relive their childhood darlings. So, with Lunacid, which at first glance looked like nothing more than an off-brand Kingsfield, I had absolutely zero interest in it. But, against all common sense, after finding a very cheap key, giving in to countless recommendations and the game’s overwhelmingly positive reception, I decided to check it out. The moment I launched the game, I was greeted with having to remap the controls through a text file… Because apparently they went through the trouble of adding all [i]those[/i] retro filters and even making a PS2-style manual and including it digitally in the game, but couldn’t be bothered to create an interface to view and adjust the controls. Priorities, I guess. <Rolling eyes> Turns out Lunacid has some genuinely cool vibes. It’s a solid slow-burn dungeon crawler full of secret passages and mysterious places to uncover. Dark, claustrophobic, and disorienting environments inhabited by creatures with fun designs, paired with primitive — yet functional — combat, supplemented by a crude progression system and a very limited set of moves. The whole package. Add to that an excellent soundtrack (sometimes reaching dreamlike tones similar to what you’d find in Silent Hill), and the game ends up with a very captivating atmosphere. By keeping unnecessary hand-holding to a minimum, leaving the player relatively free, and trusting them to put two and two together, the game genuinely manages to create a real sense of discovery without becoming unnecessarily obtuse (despite the overuse of secret passages). The game’s structure is organized enough, and its subtle approach to player guidance tends to create situations where your intelligence, patience, and curiosity are properly rewarded, which in turn — combined with the competent presentation and minimally intrusive narrative — generates enough immersion to carry the experience. Exploration is the game's main appeal. But it comes with several caveats. Its environments present interesting and visually distinct concepts, but they’re supported by level design that is generally very tame and uninspired. You can jump and use magic with navigation-related effects, but you’ll barely see any creative use of that, let alone any meaningful use of verticality. Given such a surreal premise, one would expect them to be more inventive. One would expect them to hide their secrets elegantly and not simply encourage unhealthy doses of intimacy with the walls. And then there's the "disorienting" part. Salt and Sanctuary proved many years ago that if your level design is good enough, not even a metroidvania needs a map. Lunacid isn’t exactly very strong in that department. It’s not bad enough for the issue to become severe, but intentionally or not, nearly every area in the game is too labyrinthine and homogeneous to allow for smooth navigation without an unnecessary amount of backtracking, given how easy it is to lose your train of thought while traversing the levels. You end up orienting yourself more through the directions you take than through what you actually see. You get used to using any tiny fragment of more distinct environmental detail as a landmark, as well as things like enemy remains, lamps, and other breakable objects or manual markers. A map would be a convenient crutch, but intuitive layouts would’ve been better. Combat, on the other hand, is definitely not one of the game’s selling points. It’s also not bad enough to become detrimental, but very little about it creates any real sense of friction. It’s not mechanically demanding, so most encounters revolve around extremely repetitive hit-and-retreat loops against damage sponges, heavily limited by the available weapon movesets and by the enemies’ primitive, janky behavior. Most enemies can barely do anything against you, and avoiding damage consistently — when it doesn’t simply boil down to walking backwards — is so unreliable that you’re often better off just face-tanking everything or picking them off from a distance. And of course, with these limitations, the bosses couldn’t help but be complete garbage. Pure lazy DPS checks with no balancing whatsoever. You might be breezing through regular enemies, only to suddenly reach a boss and discover that if you don’t have the appropriate level or a massive stockpile of healing items, good luck beating it — because no amount of skill is going to help you chew through that mountain of HP any faster. There’s a myriad of spells and items with fun effects, but in practice, due to the limited shortcut slots and how situational most of them are, they rarely feel like meaningful additions. That’s when using them doesn’t simply break the game altogether... They also tried to give some weapons elemental properties so you could optimize the damage dealt to enemies, but outside of a few very specific cases, you’ll barely notice any difference. Bigger number usually wins. The inventory is organized through lists. Items are sorted alphabetically, but they don’t have icons to help you identify them more easily. Combined with the shortcut limitations and the inability to simply discard or sell items, what ends up happening is that as you progress, you accumulate an ever-growing inconvenient list of useless junk. And the longer you play, the worse it gets. Progression, in turn, consists of finding new things, which is fun. And leveling up, which isn’t. Leveling up means allocating points into categories that alter the properties of your basic abilities, such as guard effectiveness, movement speed, spell usage, and jump height. In practice, that means you need to dump several points into stats just to reach what would be considered a basic character in any game that isn’t Kingsfield. That didn’t work for me. Put 40~50 points into agility if you want an even remotely enjoyable experience. And that’s about it. There’s more, of course. It’s a functional game with a satisfying sense of adventure, a drop of humor, and “cool vibes,” but it never truly surprises in any meaningful sense of the word. Aside from smoothing out a few rough edges, the game doesn't bring anything new. It doesn't redefine ou refine the genre; instead, it relies purely on nostalgia. It would’ve been an excellent game… 30 years ago. Simple and intuitive, it has multiple endings. Several mysteries. It never overstays its welcome. Was it better than I expected? Yes. Was it worth my time? Not really. Will I ever play it again? No chance. This is one of those “one and done” games. Recommended only with a heavy discount.

90% positive ratings is crazy. Play Verho and skip this slog.

The initial first hours of this game are definitely strong when it comes to nailing that old console/retro vibe with a pretty solid soundtrack that accompanies the areas. as well as the general art style for said areas. Unfortunately however, this games mechanics are about as wide as a ocean and as deep as a puddle. Basically no matter what class you start with you still end up becoming wicked strong incredibly fast, when the game Isn't even difficult to begin with, so you start zipping through areas at mach-10 speed. A lot of this game's gameplay boils down to find big area with massive diverging paths, locate said thing to progress IE (catacombs fire section), then rinse and repeat. The game is so easy in fact that I actually started to get bored and is the reason I ultimately decided to drop the game and move on to something else. If you are aware of this games overall simplicity and come in for just retro vibes then I'm sure you'll have a much better time. 6/10.

Visual and Atmosphere are good. And some of the music is really good. But that doesn't solely make a good game. Damn if it isnt really really boring at times. You are just walking around some very bland and boring hallways at time with a single texture and no variety. I get the whole indie game referencing old ps1 games, but you generally you don't reference the bad stuff to. The combat is really boring, often just left clicking and walking back a bit. I really wish they had added anything, anything at all to make it slightly more interesting other that often circle strafing and attacking. I've had this game in my backlog for so long since I loved the style and love metroidvania and souls-likes. Its got some alright loop backs but the rest of the level design kind of sucks. I think even playing Doom or Doom II there was more variety in which hallway I was walking down. So much walking and most of it isn't rewarding or anything. Honestly kind of frustrating seeing the potential of this game and then playing it and seeing how squandered it was.