Lumino City

‘Lumino City’ is a delightful, charming point-and-click adventure/puzzle game. The first thing about the game that captivated me was the graphics. The handcrafted setting – made with real objects like cardboard, wooden sticks, and glass/plastic balls – gives this game a whimsical look. In this game, you play as Lumi in your search for your grandfather. All he left for you is a handyman’s manual that acts as the game’s in-game hint book and solutions manual. The threadbare story of ‘Lumino City’ is simply there to deliver you puzzles to solve one after another. Every area of Lumino City you visit will require you to solve a puzzle or two before you can proceed. In the past, I’ve complained how arbitrary some puzzles are in adventure games. The fact that these puzzles don’t fit organically into the game’s time period or landscape would irk me slightly. The collection of puzzles in ‘Lumino City’ is no different by itself. Yet, because of the quirky, charming tone is set immediately upon you taking your first step into the titular city, this eclectic assortment of puzzles seems more acceptable. The puzzles in ‘Lumino City’ aren’t terribly challenging in general, with exception to two or three. They’re pretty small in scope, making it easy to experience the game in piecemeal. Still, it’s a shame that the extent of the puzzles can’t match the ambition and scope of the game world design, and is rather confined. At least the game doesn’t feature any overused sliding puzzles and switcheroo/hop-over puzzles. Despite my complaints, I was never bored playing ‘Lumino City’. I had a good time playing it, feeling adequately challenged by the puzzles, and enjoying the colourful beauty of the game world at every turn. Sure, the “story” doesn’t explain much until the credits, but I love how wholesome the game is. ‘Lumino City’ may not be a perfectly crafted game, but it’s easily one of my favourites because of its artistic design, presentation, and overall fun.

Great artwork and great puzzles (not brainbreaking and not to easy too). It has some issues but I love it.

It has been a long time since I've played a puzzle adventure with challenging puzzles beautifully integrated into the game play. Very creative and pleasing on the eyes. Some text is very small and makes it difficult to read at times, but other than that, I highly recommend this game.

The art really got my attention and I think it's worth playing just for it. There's a lot of attention to detail in the worldbuilding. There are a lot of posters, books and pamphlets that shed some light on what happened to the city and why it is this way. The game is divided in smaller sections with standalone puzzles. Once solved, you proceed to the next section. Each run is automatically saved in one slot and it lets you go back the previous sections if you want. The puzzles are interesting but not too hard in general. You have a hintbook embedded in the game in a really clever way but I didn't use it at all. Most of them takes advantage of the intuition of how things work in the real world, but there are some trial and error involved in some of them. The solutions of some of the puzzles were not straightforward and there was no easy logical way to solve them. These were the few times where I felt a little frustrated. Got a few glitches but nothing game breaking. I finished the game in about 7h, taking my time to explore as much as I could. It's quite a short one but anyone fond of puzzles will enjoy it!

The game, when in focus, is lovely, but in most areas you'll have several layers out of focus. This happened so often that my eyes were burning through most of the game. Add to that a soundtrack that just seems repetitive/overly-high pitched, and poorly explained puzzles (not to mention one that is nearly broken to the point where the Devs have actually posted instruction on how to skip past it if it isn't working [I'm looking at you, Morse Code!]), and I can't recommend this game. If you do purchase it, there is a bit of a "story" during the credits, but not much.