It all begins rather abruptly. Üri, the protagonist of Luna: The Shadow Dust (a game that’s not to be confused with Luna, Funomena’s 2017 puzzler), a small boy with a hood that makes him look as if he’s got bunny ears, falls from a great height. After he’s dusted himself off and gotten his bearings, he discovers a large tower, stretching all the way into the sky. The task is clear: let’s climb that thing. And that’s pretty much all the context you’re given. Luna likes to keep it simple. All this point and click puzzler is asking you to do is, well, point and click. You ascend the tower one room per level, and in order to do proceed, you need to open the door leading out of the room, much like finding the solution to an escape room puzzle. As the boy enters from one end of the room, it’s always a good idea to find out what’s even clickable in order to start out. Some rooms are dominated by large machines, so that you can already tell there will be buttons to press and levers to push. Trial and error is encouraged, and figuring solutions out naturally feels rewarding.
Luna: The Shadow Dust reviewDevelopers: Lantern StudioPublisher: Coconut Island GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC and Mac
Sometimes trial and error is all you have, though, since Luna is a game that communicates entirely without words. Some of the more intricate puzzles have visual hints hidden somewhere in the room, but since even these are occasionally difficult to work out, all you’re left with is clicking around until inspiration strikes.
To be fair, I rarely got completely lost. Most of Luna’s puzzles range from simple yet elegant to perhaps a little too easy to solve, but this is coming from someone who’s near-exclusively played LucasArts adventure games as a child, which famously feature a lot more counterintuitive puzzles. Many puzzles in Luna are nevertheless classics you will have seen in almost any game – can you really call something a puzzle game if you don’t have to put together an image by rotating different discs? – but the simple and too simple generally strike a good balance here. A lot of the simplicity of the puzzles comes from the fact that everything you need is part of the room – if you give yourself a moment to take it all in, you’ll quickly work out what’s possible and can start working on the solution. To some, the occasional trial and error may become frustrating, but I found it oddly relaxing to find a way to advance even without a central eureka moment that turned everything around.
The rooms that really stuck with me, however, featured puzzles that were both clever and visually stunning. Early on you gain a small furry companion to help you with puzzling, and I particularly enjoyed a room in which you play with shadows in order to help him reach a lever. At the same time this puzzle was probably one of the more exasperating, as its success depends on some fast, precise clicking and switching between the boy and the small animal, during which the controls wouldn’t always react well, forcing me to run through the entire sequence again.