Lunacid is the most 8 out of 10 game that is actually a 10
out of 10. It achieves everything it sets out to do, and while not flawless,
it’s still a perfect experience if it really clicks with you.
Obviously, it really clicked with me. I love the late 90s
high fidelity visuals; I love the soundtrack, which fits the game and its
varied areas to a T; I love the occasional silly or fourth wall breaking
moments like the various video filters you can choose from or setting the
language to be Nyan (which makes all the text in the game and menus Nyan-cat
inspired gibberish); I even love the amount of miss-able content and secrets,
because I never am trying to 100% a game on first playthrough.
Lunacid is one of those games you want to go in blind, other
than maybe watching a trailer or a couple spoiler-free gameplay videos to see
if it’s your vibe.
I will say, the difficulty of the game contributes to its 8
out of 10 rating. By this I do mean the overall difficulty (some enemies are
piss easy, some are big difficulty spikes) but also difficult in the sense of
knowing what to do next/where to go next. Much like the first Dark Souls, while
I also thoroughly enjoyed my initial blind playthrough of, I did have to look
up a couple things that weren’t nearly as obvious as the game seemed to think
they were. In addition, it’s possible to stumble on secrets or hidden items but
have no clue what they do without looking them up online. In one instance I
couldn’t figure out how to get any further into newer areas without looking up
where to access the next area or two. Whether all of this is a good or bad
thing will depend on you and how much you like being “lost.”
I like that this game encourages lateral thinking, looking
at your inventory and set of spells and trying to come up with solutions.
Though for me the boss fights mainly consisted of spamming my strongest attacks
and chugging health potions, I honestly thought this was a fun break from the
normal combat of the game, which is more measured and encourages patience.
I’ve seen many people say the melee combat is clunky and
underpowered, but to me it worked great 99% of the time. Certainly I had the
Skyrim issue of whiffing attacks I thought had enough reach to hit the enemy,
though I chalk this up to my own ignorance; for 2/3 of my playthrough I didn’t
notice different weapons even had different range stats. I always found it fun
to switch weapons and spells up, try new things, rather than just minmax by
paying attention to elemental weaknesses or weapon stats. That said, there
certainly are enemies and areas that feel like a big difficulty spike until you
change your weapon/spell and suddenly because you’re hitting their elemental
weakness they die like chumps.
The main thing this game nails is atmosphere, a sense of
being in an otherworldly place and not fully understanding what is happening.
As such, while I inadvertently ended up in the final boss fight before I really
wanted to, I decided to roll with it, and this sudden climax and slightly abstract
ending sequence have all combined to intrigue me into another playthrough. To
add to this, I want to return to this world someday soon. When arriving to each
new area, when encountering each new enemy, I was so spellbound, at times even scared
of what I was experiencing, that I wanted to just linger and observe. Moreover,
Lunacid succeeded multiple times in jumpscaring me (those god damn floating
horse heads!) as well as establishing a feeling of dread I only a couple times
experienced in Dark Souls.
As someone who never played the Kings Field games, I can
safely say this game stands on its own and doesn’t feel like a slavish imitator
or mere ancestor of that series. It feels like a modern game, though you can
change the settings to customize the experience to be more like that series.
My second and final biggest gripe about the game is the lack
of a clear indication of what levelling up certain stats does. It took me quite
a while to realize why I couldn’t make certain jumps in the game, for instance.
It was NOT because I wasn’t supposed to be able to make those jumps, but
because I needed to pour points into my Speed and Dexterity to run faster and
jump higher/further, respectively. As I was trying for a magic focused build
since I started as a Witch, I was putting my upgrades towards that.
In some game design sense, though, my two big gripes seem
intertwined with the parts I loved. This is kind of what I mean about it being
a 8 out of 10 yet 10 out of 10 game. It’s part of this style of game, this vibe
of game even, that you end up figuring it out with a community online. Lunacid
is never so difficult that you could theoretically level yourself into a dead
end, and the cryptic nature of a few progression points didn’t deter my enjoyment.
Indeed this indirect logic seems fitting for the abstract
nature of the game’s world and backstory, and it was fun trying to figure out
what certain things did, like the spell that brings objects to life or the Headless
Horseman boss I stumbled into, which after completing the game I looked up and
it turned out to be a seasonal event I lucked into unknowingly, which retrospectively
made that a special memory I now cherish from playing it.
Ultimately Lunacid is a 10/10 experience in a 8/10 game.
Perhaps a better way of saying that is it’s a subjective 10 and objective 8.
