Luna Abyss

My latest Game Pass plans went kind of belly up for a couple of reasons and it was looking like I was beating only one title for the 13€/month the service is currently (on PC). That's not an amazing value proposition for a singular game you even lose access to. But then, like a week before its release, Luna Abyss was announced to be on Game Pass on day one and I got more worth out of my month.

We have Saros on PC

Luna Abyss caught my eye in some showcase -- a good while back now, I feel -- and I had been following it on Steam ever since. It's a first person shooter, or more specifically, a first person bullet hell game with a striking crimson noir visuals (or whatever shade of red that is). I would say that, like with Othercide, the style looks impressive at first but your eyes eventually tire of looking at the almost monochrome environments. Luna Abyss does have other colors too, though; the red lights are just the most prominent thing in the dark. I think the game starts with its worst level as well: claustrophobic stone and concrete tunnels. Later on, there are much more impressive vistas.

The game's setting is weird, maybe just for the sake of being so -- I bet the developers have watched their anime. This impression got strong when I possessed a goliath for the first time: the music track there has such mech anime vibe to it.

200 years before the game's present, a small planetoid appeared next to Earth. In the current day, you are "Fawkes" who has been sentenced to serve time on this "mimic moon" Luna for the crime of having glowing red eyes. You have a personal overseer, a giant head called Aylin who sends you on missions to shorten your sentence.

Places around the apparently-colonized Luna are dilapidated, I guess for the Scourge event that happened -- and is still ongoing. There's a mysterious All-Father figure, and the Abyss speaks to you or something. The weird-ass biomechanical bodies reminded me a lot of The Void, the odd Russian game I played 9 years ago. The bodies with more complete human-like parts appear female, regardless of who is inhabiting them. How queer, I thought and then remembered that the studio, Kwalee Labs, is based in the UK: queer is exactly how things were going to be.

I read a comment on Reddit saying the game's title is awkward to say for having the first word end and the second begin with the same vowel sound. It doesn't feel that to me but I don't know how it's for an anglophone. I do wonder if the devs, being British, put the intrusive R between the words, the name sounding more like "lunar abyss" when spoken out loud.

I also wonder the few random Finnish names appearing in the game's lore notes. And did the font used not have the ä glyph or why was Hyvärinen spelled as Hyvaarinen?

Simple though entertaining

Gameplay-wise Luna Abyss is fun enough. It is quite arcadey, though -- comes with bullet hell silliness, I suppose -- and there are no character build options or anything of that sort. You have four weapons (eventually) and few special moves to battle all the projectiles thrown at you. There's a lot of linear traversal with various different methods. Occasionally there's a health upgrade or a lore note you'll probably miss if you just keep zooming forward without looking around.

By holding RMB (and whatever it's on a controller), you lock to an enemy. The feature seems to rub some people the wrong way -- including me initially -- but I think it's better to take Luna Abyss as the arcade experience it's meant to be. Aiming at enemies with all the orbs in the way is also kind of challenging without locking, I found. For some reason there's also a brief slow motion effect for every killed enemy. It felt wrong but fortunately you can turn it off. You might as well disable the hold-to-interact while you're at it.

The rifle and shotgun don't feel very effective, the former especially so. I guess it so that you don't accidentally kill enemies you want to use your finisher move on to restore health. The rifle does get an upgrade later that speeds it up a bit.

The bosses of the game rotate between two phases: one is for fighting the boss itself, the second for killing adds to restore health. I wish there had been some escalation in the fights, like the boss getting new moves or at least throwing stuff at you faster. But it's always the same: adds at every quarter of health bar lost and then back to the same again. Luna Abyss was a fairly challenging experience for me on the default difficulty: I had to attempt a couple of the bosses more than once to beat them. My deaths usually came from dashing right into one of the focused projectile swarms.