LUNA The Shadow Dust is a hand-drawn point-and-click adventure game with a heavy focus on cinematics and environmental puzzles that occasionally require an element of timing to complete. As far as I know, there isn’t a sub-genre to describe games like LUNA and TSIOQUE, but since their relationship to ordinary adventure games isn’t unlike the relationship between platformers and cinematic platformers (which differentiates something like Super Mario World from Another World), “cinematic point-and-click” should be close to the mark. LUNA The Shadow Dust is an excellent example of this genre when most everything clicks, with its room-by-room structure and clever puzzles complementing the slower movement speed rather than feeling hindered by it. There are also some downsides to be aware of, among which a final puzzle that stretches LUNA‘s wordless insistence that you figure out the rules to each puzzle to its breaking point, but they do little to diminish the charm.

There are 9 .jpg screenshots included in this review. The full gallery consists of 485 lossless .png files at 3840x2160 and can be found by clicking here.

LUNA The Shadow Dust‘s story is vague but clearly establishes its rules

You play as a young boy named Üri and a little creature named Layh, though you won’t actually learn their names from the game itself (as far as I can tell, their names are only revealed in the Steam achievements)—LUNA The Shadow Dust is entirely wordless, telling its story through gestures and context rather than explicitly spelling anything out. Some of the things you’ll initially intuit won’t be accurate at all because of this. For example, I spent a large portion of the story thinking that it was a mythical story showing what the inhabitants of LUNA‘s world believe causes their day/night cycle, but this doesn’t quite fit what you see. The absence of concrete details makes it hard to nail down the “correct” interpretation.

Once you take a step back, though, it’s hard not to appreciate how well the rules of LUNA‘s world are communicated. You might not understand how Üri ended up in the life he sometimes has flashbacks to, but you’ll understand what he and his master were doing and what went awry to shroud their tower/world in a darkness filled with malicious shadows.

Even if you don’t, the burgeoning friendship between Üri and Layh is adorable to watch and almost makes the whole thing worth it on its own. Much of this boils down to the expressiveness of the art and its ability to imbue even its mice with oodles of personality. LUNA‘s puzzles help, too, by often requiring switching back and forth between the two in order to overcome obstacles, establishing their reliance on one another by making clear that neither of them can make it to the top of the tower and banish the darkness on their own.

Most of the puzzles here hit the sweet spot in terms of pacing and difficulty

LUNA is a game broken up into discrete levels, with the goal always being to reach a door or ladder leading to the next area. One you clear an area, you’ll never need to return to it again (unless you missed an optional area that’s required to unlock the additional ending video), so this isn’t a game with a lot of backtracking. If you’re ever stuck, you only ever have to look around the 1-3 small screens that make up the puzzle. That’s led some to accuse LUNA of being too easy. I don’t necessarily agree that convenience takes away from the challenge, nor do I particularly appreciate the implication that tedium is a legitimate method of creating difficulty. This is a game where the difficulty and fun arises more from figuring out how a puzzle works—because without dialogue, you’re left to figure out the goal for yourself—than completing a long series of tasks.

As tends to be the case in games with hand-drawn art, nothing can be skipped or sped up. Neither the movement animations nor unskippable cutscenes that sometimes precede levels (with LUNA making the unfortunate decision to autosave immediately before them rather than afterward) can be sped up. This isn’t even close to being the slowest point-and-click that I’ve played, though, and the manageable size of rooms makes movement speed a non-issue for the most part.

Üri and Layh can usually interact with different room elements, with Üri being taller and Layh having the ability to jump in and out of shadows to use them as platforms like in 2013’s Contrast. That can lead to puzzles where you have to move Üri so that he casts a shadow on the wall for Layh to use as a platform. Most of the time, though, you find yourself in a room filled with strange objects and have to figure them out.

Usually, the environment contains a hint about what to do next, which is another advantage of LUNA‘s smaller areas. The final puzzle tries to expand the playable area and suffers as a result, though, containing too many objects that could mean too many possible things in an area that’s so large that it contains a slow-moving elevator. I probably spent 30 minutes to an hour figuring out this one puzzle, and it’s actually way simpler than it appears. This is the only puzzle that suffers from this problem, but allowing that kind of overthinking makes for a sour note to end on.

LUNA The Shadow Dust isn’t hugely colorful, but it’s incredibly expressive

LUNA‘s story leans heavily into “light versus dark” at a point where the dark is at an advantage, so many of its environments reinforce this by being colored a drab bluish-gray. That having been said, there are also several rooms that are bright and/or colorful breaking up the less colorful ones, and even at its least colorful, the art is filled with abundant personality. The moment I realized its quality was when a mouse caught me off-guard by waving goodbye to Üri as he departed. This mouse wasn’t an important character. In fact, it had just been introduced, one of several mice that pop up over the course of the story. Earlier in the game, another mouse glared at Layh after being becoming scared and dropping its cheese, clearly unimpressed by this turn of events and Layh’s complicity in them. Little things like this add up and help the journey to feel less lonely.

I’m also a big fan of the music, which glides effortlessly between being background music and stealing the scene. Most soundtracks that use strings, harps, and other orchestral instruments are content to create a smattering of semi-musical noise that doesn’t build up to anything, but LUNA The Shadow Dust‘s soundtrack uses its more percussive elements such as the harp to create a sense of rhythm while strings and flutes play memorable melodies on top. And while the soundtrack does tend to stick to one key a little more than most games should, the game is short enough that having multiple songs in the same key never has the time to become fatiguing. Both the art and music are uncommonly good.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 2/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ -- 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this LUNA The Shadow Dust review. It took me about 3-4 hours to finish, and another hour on top of that to unlock a missing cinematic/ending.

LUNA The Shadow Dust review – Enchanting and clever first appeared on Killa Penguin