The drawings are reminiscent of Janosch, the mood a little like Far: Lone Sails, and yet LUNA – The Shadow Dust is unique in every respect. What the four Lantern Studios artists did in this point-and-click adventure exudes more charm and magic than half of all indie productions on Steam combined. It's easy to forgive little quirks.
Quirks is a strong word, possibly too strong for the little carvers who have sneaked into the adventure. Perhaps they can even be understood as conscious design decisions that you should make friends with. No matter from which perspective you look at them, there are only small, insignificant parts of the gaming experience that ultimately make so little that they border on hair splitting.
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And yet they stand out because the rest of the game is such a well-designed piece of art that every little concept deviation stands out like a red blob on a grayscale scale. Once seen, you cannot forget them. You want to bite your tongue or hit your knee just to distract yourself from your knowledge.
For example, this one time when readable text appears. An exaggerated point of criticism? No, not in a game that everywhere avoids text like the devil holy water, whether spoken or written. LUNA – The Shadow Dust doesn't even use text in the start menu, but refers to symbols for starting or continuing the campaign, returning to Windows and so on. Only this time, sometime after the first couple of puzzles, do you read that you should press the spacebar on your keyboard to switch between the controls of the hero and his little animal companion. Aaargh! Just why? A keyboard pictogram would have served the same purpose.
Darn! It is the hair in the soup in an almost perfect composition, in a game whose music from the first second so gently caresses the ears that one loses all reference to reality. Without a tangible melody, without a fixed topic, just floating, without an anchor, without binding.
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This game is an experience of hand-drawn impressions. An animated, interactive picture book that brings out his childish imagination without sugar; that remains so stylish in every respect that you never doubt the way the game is conveyed, the plot or the motivation of the characters. And then something.
The enigmatic tower
The motivation of the main character? You don't know them. But you don't have to know them either, because the little boy, estimated to be ten or eleven years old, who makes his way through a large tower on a wonderful flying island one night, moves beyond any rational size anyway. Is it a dream? A fantasy? Doesn't matter!
The environment exists because it has to exist to provide a backdrop for the puzzles of the rooms in this tower, nothing more and nothing less. His actions do not need a lush history or a resolution, especially since the beautifully animated cutscenes, which are occasionally recorded, leave a lot of space for free interpretation and own connections. Just like the motifs in the rooms of the tower.
Each of these rooms presents a completely different puzzle than the room in front of it, and its logic is not always based on reality. For example, when the boy's small accompanying pet jumps onto a shadow on the wall and thereby becomes a shadow figure himself. Or when the boy clones the animal in the housing of an organ so that the small copies take over the function of organ pipes. Sometimes you feed a mouse with spicy food so that it turns a thorny branch with fiery breath to ashes, sometimes you water and care for a tree in an environment in which you use a switch to change the season.
It is therefore all the more surprising that all of these highly diverse puzzles can be mastered with the simplest conceivable control. The mouse cursor takes only three forms in the course of the game, namely that of an arrow with which to tell where a figure should go, that of a set of legs for the command to climb a ladder or a ledge, and an interpreting hand for use of utensils. There is no inventory. Sounds simple, and once you know what to do, the puzzles turn out to be quite easy to see through. Nevertheless, you often sit brooding in front of the screen and wonder what detail you may have overlooked. Is the order wrong? Is something missing?
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Unfortunately, this is where the second little carver comes to light, which the spin designers undermined. It's about a lack of feedback. In most cases, the environment tells you unambiguously that you have solved a puzzle or that you have successfully recognized an important intermediate step. Unfortunately, this is not the case everywhere, which means that sometimes steps, which can be time-consuming, are repeated more often than necessary.
hand drawn
All backgrounds and animations consist of hand-drawn images, like in a classic cartoon, which means that some movements are slower than other games. For example, when the small companion animal climbs a ladder. It hops from rung to rung, which looks funny and natural, but can be a little tricky in the course of a game if you look at it for the seventh or eighth time.
Fortunately, all other procedures work smoothly. For example, if you place the boy and his little animal in different rooms and control them one after the other in order to perform parallel actions. There are no loading times or other disturbing interruptions.
Due to the high effort behind the presentation, the adventure ends after only 18 rooms. Admittedly, there are 18 beautifully designed rooms and just as many puzzles that sometimes make you think outside the box. Nevertheless, puzzle fans will need an extensive game night to play through. Those who are not quite as experienced when it comes to puzzles will have to hang on for a second day.
The puzzle adventure Luna: The Shadow Dust is to be financed via Kickstarter.
No need to sulk. LUNA – The Shadow Dust is not a game that should be understood as a marathon. It is not a game that you just play through and forget about. A bit more scope would have been nice, but would hardly have had a decisive impact on the overall experience.
