I can't emphasise it enough. Lunark is totally fucking ruined by its Kickstarter reward integration.
The game follows hot on the trail of Another World and (much more so) Flashback. Quiet, sombre games that stranded us on strange, desolate alien planets. Imagine if in the first 20 minutes of Star Wars, C3PO and R2D2 had to have conversations with the full investors board of 20th Century Fox, learning about their hobbies and the names of their pets. It's like when there's a free mobile version of an old game, but you have to watch an advert every minute.
Lunark's tone is all over the place, and it really strips out all potential investment I might have put into it. It's a game that went into production because a talented pixel artist got an enthusiastic response when posting gifs on Twitter. The game looks great, no doubt, but the nightclub and alien furries are eyecandy that really clash against the thrust of the story. It's a tribute to cinematic platformers, but a dishearteningly uncinematic one. The weak jokes and constant tonal swerves undercut any worldbuilding aspect it ever feigns interest in. I bawked a little when I saw Fumito Ueda listed in the Special Thanks credits.
There's also aspects of the game that I will address as unquestionably "dated", like the save functionality. Lunark's levels are often long, complex and challenging. You're often overwhelmed by it, and quite relieved when you overcome a tricky sequence. There's often well-placed checkpoints, but those aren't saves. You only save when you finish a level. Until you do, your console is locked into Lunark until you either get past the bullshit that caused you to turn it off in the first place, or you sacrifice all your mid-level progress for a go on Splatoon or something. There's no need. I'll defend the original SNES Super Mario World's use of infrequent save points, as replaying levels is quick, fun, and builds your momentum towards the next challenging checkpoint spot, but it's got no place in a 2023 indie game. I don't think much of its audience are going to stick around to see the ending.
At its best, Lunark occasionally works as a Flashback fangame for Flashback fans. It's when it elaborates on its gameplay and offers complementary level concepts and enemy types. It's kind of refreshing to see something with such reverence for Flashback's gameplay, when so many players bemoan having to actually adopt its restrictive controls and logic patterns. I wouldn't care a tenth as much about Flashback if I didn't love how it played, and I was pleased with a lot of the things Lunark added to it. Setting off security drones to explode over targets and timing your movement for overhead obstacles atop a speeding train. I thought it was pretty cool. I'd have loved to have seen these things in a game that felt like a cohesive adventure, with tangible stakes and a logical progression of events.
I'm not someone who typically prioritises story, but it's so central to why these games work. It's what makes Oddworld haunting and fascinating, or why breaking out of the cage in Another World feels like more than just pressing left and right repeatedly. If I don't feel a connection to the character's situation, I'd rather they didn't waste my time pretending there was a world to take interest in.
I really wanted to like Lunark. Us Flashback guys ought to stick together. We're a dying breed. It just feels like the guy was taking on jobs that he wasn't suited for. The art and gameplay are good, but the project ought to have had a director with a clear vision. As it is, it's going to sit on ten-thousand Steam libraries with fifteen minutes of logged activity.
The game follows hot on the trail of Another World and (much more so) Flashback. Quiet, sombre games that stranded us on strange, desolate alien planets. Imagine if in the first 20 minutes of Star Wars, C3PO and R2D2 had to have conversations with the full investors board of 20th Century Fox, learning about their hobbies and the names of their pets. It's like when there's a free mobile version of an old game, but you have to watch an advert every minute.
Lunark's tone is all over the place, and it really strips out all potential investment I might have put into it. It's a game that went into production because a talented pixel artist got an enthusiastic response when posting gifs on Twitter. The game looks great, no doubt, but the nightclub and alien furries are eyecandy that really clash against the thrust of the story. It's a tribute to cinematic platformers, but a dishearteningly uncinematic one. The weak jokes and constant tonal swerves undercut any worldbuilding aspect it ever feigns interest in. I bawked a little when I saw Fumito Ueda listed in the Special Thanks credits.
There's also aspects of the game that I will address as unquestionably "dated", like the save functionality. Lunark's levels are often long, complex and challenging. You're often overwhelmed by it, and quite relieved when you overcome a tricky sequence. There's often well-placed checkpoints, but those aren't saves. You only save when you finish a level. Until you do, your console is locked into Lunark until you either get past the bullshit that caused you to turn it off in the first place, or you sacrifice all your mid-level progress for a go on Splatoon or something. There's no need. I'll defend the original SNES Super Mario World's use of infrequent save points, as replaying levels is quick, fun, and builds your momentum towards the next challenging checkpoint spot, but it's got no place in a 2023 indie game. I don't think much of its audience are going to stick around to see the ending.
At its best, Lunark occasionally works as a Flashback fangame for Flashback fans. It's when it elaborates on its gameplay and offers complementary level concepts and enemy types. It's kind of refreshing to see something with such reverence for Flashback's gameplay, when so many players bemoan having to actually adopt its restrictive controls and logic patterns. I wouldn't care a tenth as much about Flashback if I didn't love how it played, and I was pleased with a lot of the things Lunark added to it. Setting off security drones to explode over targets and timing your movement for overhead obstacles atop a speeding train. I thought it was pretty cool. I'd have loved to have seen these things in a game that felt like a cohesive adventure, with tangible stakes and a logical progression of events.
I'm not someone who typically prioritises story, but it's so central to why these games work. It's what makes Oddworld haunting and fascinating, or why breaking out of the cage in Another World feels like more than just pressing left and right repeatedly. If I don't feel a connection to the character's situation, I'd rather they didn't waste my time pretending there was a world to take interest in.
I really wanted to like Lunark. Us Flashback guys ought to stick together. We're a dying breed. It just feels like the guy was taking on jobs that he wasn't suited for. The art and gameplay are good, but the project ought to have had a director with a clear vision. As it is, it's going to sit on ten-thousand Steam libraries with fifteen minutes of logged activity.