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1-17 of 17 - Wanderlust, February 23, 2024
- Vulturous, February 16, 2024
- tekket (Česká Lípa, Czech Republic), February 8, 2024
- pieartsy (New York), February 3, 2024
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2 people found the following review helpful:
You Have Solved My Penalty Point Puzzle, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
So this is an Escape Room, full stop. If that sounds prejorative, that's because it is. I’m not here to pretend Escape Rooms aren’t fun. They are like the puzzle parts of IF married to the tactility, collaboration and physical presence of LARP. That’s a very successful marriage, like the couple in your lives that 20 years on are just SO happy with each other it is a burden to everyone around them. (Just shut up already, Tim and Marcie.) With that puzzle/LARP pairing you can forgive Escape Room's often tissue-thin narrative or ridiculous logical leaps.
But if you take the LARP out of it, those things run a real danger of corroding the experience. Successful IF implementations will realize this and replace it with SOMETHING. Lunium actually brings two things to the table, one of the them WAY spoilery, so be warned.
The non-spoiler element is its top-notch graphical presentation. The author’s previous work displayed really impressive graphical design chops and it was no fluke. From layout to UI to image curation it is a constant pleasure to interact with. It makes the claim that the images are not needed to play, but that’s like saying sugar is not needed to bake cookies. Technically true, but what would be the point? (I actually wonder about that assertion in any case. For my play, SO much information was conveyed graphically I’m at a loss to see how that would work. Certainly the experience would be degraded.)
Anyone else engage online Escape Rooms during COVID? We did a few and the experience was ehhh, ok? Zoom collaboration was fun but the loss of tactility and sense of place was keenly felt. None of them were as graphically immersive as Lunium.
Let’s pause here and pretend I didn’t already tell you there was a second ace up its sleeve. If I were to rate this game based on what I’ve told you so far it would be a lie to say it wasn’t Engaging, but I would feel compelled to give a penalty point for hyper-accurately replicating something whose translation loses what makes it unique and leaves only a pale shadow of what the new media is capable of. It would be like creating an elaborate stage production of people performing a scripted podcast. (Ok, that’s an imperfect metaphor but I’m on a time crunch here, roll with me.)
So here’s the SPOILER part, as promised. As is probably apparent, my biggest beef with the conceit is its inherent artificiality. Inescapably, this was my skeptical mindset at game start. Thrillingly, as the game progresses and the secrets unfold, time and again the game JUSTIFIES its artificiality. Amnesiac? (Spoiler - click to show)You’ve been drugged! Lots of keys and combinations? Narratively justified! Well, to a point, but more than it needed to be. A close set of suspects in a murder mystery? (Spoiler - click to show)The solution was tied to the PRESENCE OF THE ESCAPE ROOM ITSELF. It was that last touch that won me over. There are a satisfying array of suspects available, in the sweet spot of ‘enough to be non-trivial’ and not ‘too many to manage,’ and all with enough characterization to be distinct. When asked to solve the crime, I overlooked some in-narrative clues but instead somewhat pugnaciously declared (not out loud, in my head. I’m not insane): SERIOUS SPOILER (Spoiler - click to show)“The only way these puzzles make sense is if the protag made them. It just makes no sense otherwise.” AND THE GAME AGREED! The game traded its central mystery on the Jigsaw level contortions needed to even have an Escape Room with these protag-specific details in the first place. Well played author, you have defeated my Penalty Point puzzle!
Played: 10/28/23
Playtime: 1hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless, Penalty Point AVERTED
Would Play After Comp?: No, solved!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
An eminently logical room-escape, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The thing about escape-room inspired games is that you can’t think about them too hard, or they suffer narrative collapse. Like, okay, you’re stuck in a cell of some kind, sure – sometimes there’s a more-or-less-contrived reason the baddie would do that instead of just kill you, sometimes there isn’t, but that’s a sufficiently common genre situation that it’s not too hard to swallow. But instead of one normal lock that keeps you in (and that presumably would have had to be opened to put you there in the first place), there’s a system of like half a dozen different interlocking mechanisms that all need to align? And there just happen to be clues scattered around that make the puzzles solvable, but not too trivially so? There’s no way to rationalize this kind of setup, so instead of being a killjoy clearly you’re supposed to just turn off that part of your brain and enjoy the puzzles.
Major, major points to LUNIUM, then, that I think it basically works? It’s got all the trappings of the genre: you wake up with amnesia, chained to the wall in a room chock-a-block with paintings with mystical symbolism, scraps of paper with numbers and letters scrawled on them, turgidly-written pages of your diary that you can recover piecemeal, and a ticking-clock conceit that requires you to escape before the dawn so that you can stop the killer who trapped you from claiming their next victim. It even adds a layer of complexity by requiring you to deduce the identity of the baddie from a list of suspects to get the best ending, in addition to unlocking the final door so you can escape (I mentioned liking this structure in my Mayor McFreeze and Death on the Stormrider reviews, and I think it works well here too). And yet, when I got to the end and figured out what was going on – it actually all kind of made sense and held together! True, I haven’t gone back and rigorously tested the diegetic plausibility of every single bit of the design, but that’s an unfair standard to inflict on a piece of IF; at least as to the broad strokes, each of these bits of contrived escape-room logic hold up, and in fact things couldn’t have gone any other way!
The elegance here goes beyond the narrative, though. This is one attractive Twine game, with moody illustrations conveying a vibe as well as critical clues if you zoom in to enjoy the artwork, and the interface makes it simple to fiddle with the various safes, locks, and other paraphernalia on display. There are also well-integrated hints (plus straight-up solutions, if you need them), though many players might not need them given the well-judged clueing. There’s a nice range of puzzles here, and if they’re not especially thematic, they’re solidly designed and offer some good variety, so no particular approach overstays its welcome: there are of course a number of code-deciphering puzzles, but some are exercises in pure logic, others rely on deductive reasoning that lend a mystery-solving vibe to proceedings, and a few require a bit of lateral thinking, which lead to some satisfying aha moments while still being eminently fair. I’m not the best escape-room puzzler-solver in the world, but I only needed to go to the hints twice: once when the small screen of my phone meant I couldn’t make out an important clue (though I should say that unlike many graphically-rich Twine games, LUNIUM generally works a treat on mobile), and a second time when I’d mixed up two character’s names and therefore didn’t realize I’d already gotten the solution to the puzzle, I was just implementing the solution wrong.
As for the plot, I don’t want to say too much lest I spoil the fun reveal I alluded to above. As is typical for escape rooms, there isn’t much in ongoing narrative, but there is some backstory to discover, and this is parceled out judiciously in between bouts of puzzle-solving. As a Victorian detective, you’re on the trail of a serial killer, and while the outline is quite generic, there’s enough detail given about your previous investigations of the key suspects to give them at least a whiff of personality. There are also some specific themes that keep recurring, like an omnipresent moon motif to go along with the game’s title. As a result it’s enjoyable to read the various document-facsimiles provided, even when you’re largely skimming them looking for clues to the puzzles. This is helpful because it’s this non-puzzle-relevant information that provides the prompts needed to guess the identity of the killer, and while I got to the end with only a tentative guess at whodunnit, the ending prompts pushing me to make my accusation provided another subtle hint or two that let me feel very clever for ultimately fingering the right suspect.
LUNIUM isn’t perfect – I noticed one small bug, where I got some text mentioning the contents of my pockets after I freed myself from the wall despite not having had a chance to look in them yet. But that’s an incredibly minor issue, and I honestly am having trouble dredging up any additional constructive criticism (the writing could be a little more authentically Victorian, I guess? Really though it’s just fine for the purpose it serves). This is an assured game, playable and narratively satisfying in a way I didn’t think I was even allowed to hope an escape room game could be. So I guess that’s my other criticism: it may have spoiled me for other games in the subgenre by making it harder for me to look past it when they don’t make any sense!
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Lunium review, December 20, 2023In Lunium, you are a detective who awakes to find yourself chained up by the killer you have been pursuing. You must both discover the killer’s identity and escape the room you are locked in before they strike again.
The game has been widely compared to an escape room, and with its plethora of combination-lock puzzles, it’s easy to see why. But Lunium does take advantage of its medium to have a player character with a distinct identity, allowing it to do things that an actual escape room would be unable to do. This gives the game a bit of individuality that I enjoyed, and makes it feel like it has a reason to be a Twine game beyond the fact that most people don’t have the opportunity to make their own actual escape room.
As is typical for this style of game, most of the puzzles that you will have to solve are immediately in front of you once you’ve gotten out of being handcuffed to the wall. A common issue with this structure is that if you have too many puzzles requiring number combinations (or any other single format of answer, but it’s usually number combinations), it can become hard to tell whether you have what you need to solve a given puzzle yet. Lunium does fall into this a little, but luckily it has a “hint mode” that you can enable that will give you this information when you look at a puzzle, which I appreciated. There are also more granular hints available, but I didn’t end up using those.
The puzzles largely walked the line of being challenging enough to be satisfying without being too terribly difficult. The only place I really got hung up was the point early on when I didn’t realize that I needed to search my right pocket again after getting uncuffed, and I eventually got past that just by trying every action that was available to me. I did find it a little annoying to have to repeatedly light matches and I’m not sure the light source management added much in the way of legitimate, interesting challenge, but otherwise the gameplay experience was smooth and I moved through the game at a good clip.
The game has a slick visual design that makes good use of images to create atmosphere; the images also have clear and concise alt text for those that need it. The prose largely stays out of its own way, and the plot does what it needs to do to provide an excuse for the puzzles. (It’s all a little improbable when you get right down to it, but puzzle games tend to be.) One aspect of the final twist became apparent to me fairly quickly, but the other did require a little thought and a careful reading of the in-game documents.
I enjoyed the hour I spent playing Lunium, and if I wanted to introduce my escape room friends to IF, I think this would be an excellent place to start.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Keys and cuffs., December 4, 2023(Review based on the IFComp version of the game.)
Without reading the blurb, I had expectations of a SF or fantasy work in which Lunium could be the setting’s rare unobtainium used for magical potions or as fuel for FTL-travel. Perhaps it would be mined on a distant moon of an uninhabited planet, or it could only be activated when mixed with dewdrops under the light of the moon.
Not so. Lunium is a combination detective mystery/escape room game. You wake up in a securely locked room, chained to the wall. Your memories are vague and confused, your vision blurred. You must have been drugged…
No points for originality, but it is a solid opening, a staple of IF.
You do remember, aided by the first few objects you find, that you are a detective on the verge of solving a series of horrible murders. Now you must get out and stop the murderer.
Searching the surroundings yields keys and combinations. Unlocking drawers and safes yields clues. Investigating, analysing, combining those clues yields information about witnesses and suspects. This information can then be used to start the cycle anew.
As with a lot of escape games, the puzzles felt forced. It strains the suspension of disbelief that everything you need to escape the room and solve the crime just happens to be lying around (more or less hidden/locked away) in the very location where you’re imprisoned. In this case though, this is justified in the (rather transparent) twist ending. Still, the ending cannot negate the impression of “Oh! How convenient. I’m finding keys all around.” that I had during the game.
Many puzzles do share a common theme (hinted at in the title) that ties them together and gives a nice sense of consistency. (Except (Spoiler - click to show)the colours on the back of the painting associated with the coins in your pocket. Come on, really?)
The character sketches of the suspects/witnesses were intruiging, but too fragmentary to hold my interest in the end. I would have liked more exposition on the relationships between them, and of the circumstances in which my PC came to interrogate or investigate them. Perhaps in some more elaborate flashbacks?
Lunium is aesthetically pleasing, with beautiful and detailed pictures of the room and the details within it. The option to view and enlarge the items in the inventory is well handled and very player-friendly.
A pretty and puzzly Twine to keep your grey cells pleasantly occupied for about an hour.
- E.K., December 3, 2023
- thesleuthacademy, December 3, 2023
- radiosity (London, UK), November 26, 2023
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Complex graphical escape room game with Victorian flair, November 22, 2023I really enjoyed this escape room game.
While you’d think there’d be a big overlap in escape rooms and interactive fiction, the two have very distinct flavors (at least ifcomp-style interactive fiction). I wonder if its because escape rooms often rely heavily on visual clues? (like this game does).
In any case, this has the hallmarks of an escape room: a contrived scenario with codes, color schemes, passwords, chains, etc. where its clear the story (while strong) is in service to the puzzles.
You wake up, chained and forgetful, in a room filled with locks, drawers, safes, keys, etc.
Most of gameplay revolves around trying to figure out correct passphrases to type into boxes. The passphrases represent you having ‘done the work’ of solving.
I knew once I started this that it was pretty hard, probably too hard for me. I also knew that for this type of game, getting hints would probably significantly diminish the experience. So I persevered for quite a while, and finally solved it without hints! That was very satisfying.
There do seem to be several red herrings.
I do think this game defies a lot of conventions of IFComp games, with its fairly contrived story and emphasis on visual-only clues and passwords. However, it executed this at a high level of skill, and I really liked it.
- TheBoxThinker, November 21, 2023
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Fun and clever, November 16, 2023This is a very well-crafted game—impressive that it’s the author’s first time working with Twine! The art is moodily evocative, and I enjoyed the way the puzzles were built around it. The hint system and its tiered approach, with the first level letting you know when you didn’t need to worry about a specific object/puzzle yet, was a nice touch. (Spoiler - click to show)And I loved the ending, the way it clicked for me what the answer to “whodunnit” was—and the extra “whydunnit” twist/reveal, which explained so much in retrospect. The answer to the mystery of “who locked me in here with all these weird puzzles??” being “I did, and for good reason!” was very clever.
- Edo, November 6, 2023
- heyitswei, October 30, 2023
- Zape, October 3, 2023
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