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Luna: The Shadow Dust’s picture book charm is only skin deepDust bunnies
Dust bunnies
There’s no denying thatLuna: The Shadow Dustis exceptionally easy on the eyes. It’s a sumptuous point and click puzzler that sees you move from one lovingly hand-drawn room to the next, as you work your way up a strange and mysterious tower. You’re never explicitly sure why you’re heading skyward, since the game prides itself on its wordless storytelling. Instead of bombarding you with dozens of text boxes, it conveys its narrative through ancient-looking murals adorning the tower walls, and occasionally through the puzzles themselves. It works to an extent, but I’d say that most of the game’s pull comes from simply wanting to know what gorgeous-looking delight awaits through the next door. And without the ability to retrace your steps at any point, the only way, as they say, is up.
That sense of awe and wonder carried me along for the first half a dozen puzzle rooms, but eventually I began to see the cracks in Luna’s dense and detailed artwork. Each scene is packed with things to look and gawp at, but most of it is mere set-dressing, offering zero interaction beyond the main puzzle items.
Your cat friend has the curious ability to jump between its physical form and a special shadow form, opening up more opportunities for clever light puzzles that show the game at its best.
For all its wordless storytelling, Luna does, at least, tell you when an item can be interacted with or not. Your mouse cursor will turn into a small hand when you hover over the aforementioned cranks and levers, while a little pair of black feet will appear when you can climb up onto one of the game’s handful of small ledges. The latter are often reserved for your rotund, cat-like companion, who joins you about a quarter of the way into the game’s four-hour run-time, while the boy usually defaults to being the designated switch flipper.
That said, there are other niggles I have with Luna aside from the lack of interactivity. For all its gorgeous background scenery, its animation can be stilted and wooden, and feels a bit budget, especially when you sit it down next to the fluid, rippling delights ofGrisorGorogoa. The boy’s walking pace is also tediously slow, and he also can’t walk up and down ledges on his own to go and pull a lever you’ve just clicked on on the floor below. Instead, you’ve got to tell him to go up/down the stairs first, andthemdirect him to the object in question, which just grates on the nerves after a while. Worst of all, it commits the cardinal sin of forcing you to revisit a particular puzzle twice, in its late-game clocktower room, in order to get the solution.
The library is equal parts brilliant (using the cat to jump into a giant book and find the correct symbol so you can watch beautiful illustrations spring to life on the page) and terrible (using the boy to repeatedly go backwards and forwards fetching symbol books, in a needlessly long and repetitive minecart sequence).
