![]() There are certain rooms that can take upwards of ten minutes to get through, just because of the fact that you can’t quite see where you’re supposed to land a jump, or whether you’re achieving enough height to clear a particular obstacle. Though these entertaining moments continue for the duration of the game, the latter stages contain too many intervals of patience-testing frustration, even on Adventure mode, where you’re not especially punished for dying. There are also a number of puzzles which aren’t particularly difficult to solve, but present some amusingly abstract outcomes, such as dropping a giant bar of soap into dirty water in order to use the bubbles it produces to cross a large gap. Sometimes this would be an upgrade for my character, such as being able to jump higher or a light to illuminate hidden platforms, and other times it would be a room containing an 80’s style robot, or an homage to Donkey Kong or Back to the Future. I greatly enjoyed the serene pace, wandering around and wondering what I’d discover in the next room. This is a shame, because my first couple of hours with Lumo was a joy. Unfortunately, as the difficulty increases within the game, Lumo becomes more frustrating than challenging, mainly because of the loose controls and the fact that the isometric viewpoint makes it difficult to see where your jump is going to land. As you progress, however, you’ll find rooms become a lot more difficult to traverse, with moving platforms, spikes, fire traps and steam-spewing pipes being just a few examples of the obstacles in your way. In the early stages of the game, this isn’t too much of a punishment, as each room is a fairly straightforward puzzle to overcome. If you die in Lumo, you return to the start of whichever room you happen to be in at the time. Adventure more provides you with infinite lives, a map, and the ability to save your game at any point, while Old School gives you finite lives and no map, and you’re working against the clock. Titled ‘Adventure’ or ‘Old School’, your choice will drastically alter your experience of Lumo. While this can be seen from the combination of attractive, hi-definition visuals shown from an isometric viewpoint, it is explicit outlined in the two game modes that are available to be chosen from the main menu. Lumo seems to straddle the line between harking back to the early days of video gaming and providing an attractive experience to gamers of a more recent generation. Though you’re never explicitly told where you are or what you’re supposed to do next, your wanderings through this mysterious world have you encountering giant spiders, fixing broken conveyor belts, and avoiding perilous traps, all while trying to discover how to get back to the real world. In Lumo, a teenager manages to find their way into a game development studio, and in the course of their explorations, transports themselves into a video game world with more than a hint of 1980’s adventure games about it.
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