Sometimes you see a game, and it grabs you immediately. There’s a lot to be said about the importance of that first audio visual impression a game can have, how a slick art style paired with a booming voice or sweeping soundtrack can steal your heart. Roughly two weeks ago, on the GDC expo floor, Luna Abyss may of well been just that.

To learn more about the game, I sat down and talked to creative director Benni Hill (don’t hum the tune) about the upcoming first-person bullet-hell shooter from Bonsai Collection. Where does that art style come from, and how exactly do you transfer a traditionally 2D genre effectively into a 3D game?

The game is a striking clash of dark concrete and metal, peppered with pipes, stairs, and mechanical horror. You as a convict with mysterious crimson eyes have been sent to the Red Moon, a strange orbital boy that appeared over earth 250 years ago. While there, you must serve a prison sentence, ordered by the loud everpresent voice of your mechanical warden to discover relics hidden in the megastructure.

The game is rich with warranted inspiration, itself a narrative and thematic cocktail of Bioshock, Nier Automata and Returnal. The Bonsai Collective itself is a develop filled with staff with a deep passion for dark universes and high octane action.

“The game’s that I and art director Harry Corr were passionate about were more action-oriented titles. We like dark and mysterious spaces – we’re big Nier Automata fans, and the same goes for Dark Souls and Bloodborne. It was the point in our careers when we just went, yeah lets just do this and make the kind of game we love”.

Bonsai Collective, according to Hill, is a “world building first” team. When looking to create the Red Moon and beyond the team brought their personal love for classic Japanese media including Neon Genesis Evangelion and Blame, and brutalist architecture to create a distinct aesthetic that the rest of the game could be built around.

Hill explains these initial inspirations: “There’s a lot of brutalism in the game in the form of these massive concrete structures, and I was fascinated by brutalist art and brutalist architecture, particularly Soviet structures. There’s some amazing work particularly in the early 20th century, to the point where I’ve got a bunch of coffee books at home!”

This paired with deep ruby lighting that makes the whole game pop, something Hill claims allows their small team to present a “striking” look to a high quality, while also being manageable in the long term.

So, having locked in a unique look, where did the bullet hell gameplay come from? According to Hill, a desire to play into their strengths as world builders presented an opportunity: “We knew that we didn’t want to do like a traditional shooter at that point, we wanted to do something that was a little bit more physical. So we create bullets, right?”

Over time this developed, lock on was added as was the “visceral and physical feel” of the bullets, something that ties it to the world around you while navigating the arenas of Luna Abyss. Stages needed to be bigger so that players could actually dodge the incoming barrage of fire, while AI had to be programmed in such a way so that enemies would just unload waves of bullets out of your line of sight. But after all was said and done the team had brought over that bullet-hell feel.

The result of this work is a shooter where you have to keep your distance and focus more on dodging incoming fire than rushing in as you would in something like Doom Eternal. It is the first game I’ve played, albeit in the imperfect 20 minute slot on the GDC show floor, that truly brought that bullet-hell feel to the FPS genre.

Having talked to Hill, and had a short time with the game at GDC, I was left wondering what exactly makes a game stick out in 2023, following decades of innovation in the FPS genre. The answer according to Hill is a tried and true approach – make a solid package and the people will come.

“The whole package has to be interesting. It’s not just like the core mechanics. I think you can try and find that golden egg and a mechanic as a starting point. For us, our background in world building and art let us really delve into our aesthetic, then other aspects like our shooter mechanics that fit with that world were found later.”

“I think creating that whole package and making that unique is what attracts players, because they want to engage with that world and engage with interesting enemies. They want to engage with interesting content,” Hill concludes.

Sitting and writing this a while after trying the game out for myself, Luna Abyss is certainly the most memorable game I messed around with in recent memory. One I can’t wait to try out in full when it finally launches.