Just started playing Lorn's Lure
I just began playing Lorn's Lure, a first-person platformer set in an extremely Blame!-core universe.
You play a lithe android boy who is chasing a glitchy, owl-like digital phenomenon through the ruins of a dead megacity. Early in the game, you acquire a pair of hand axes which allow you to climb straight up concrete walls; the platforming subsequently becomes largely about route-scouting and creative interpretation of the environment.
You are capable of landing on extremely tiny platforms--you can really stick to pretty much anything, and the game is very, very forgiving about reloading to your last good landing before a fall. This means that although the platforming is sometimes incredibly fiddly and precise, I haven't grown bitter about it yet.
The world feels as if it deserves those desperate jumps. You're leaping off of vast, rusty cables and shimmying along monumental bent nails and twisted wires. Every space you explore is huge and heartless. This game is celebratory in its relentless Blame!-lifting... like Killy in that comic, you're forced to pick improbable routes across a space that feels as if it barely acknowledges you. More than once, I found myself walking up an enormous slanted pipe and suddenly losing all sense of a fixed horizon. I couldn't tell whether I was walking across a flat surface or a steeply-sloped one. It's very good at being disorienting [laudatory]!
I love how quick and deft the character controller is, how much fun it is to find the intended route and "defeat" it. The game has a bit of a simplified surf mechanic in it, and it sometimes feels as if it might be a bit of speedrunner-bait. I am not too far into the game yet but I've found the pacing to be sufficiently diverse, and the drip of new tools, mechanics, and completionist challenges to be pretty engaging.
Its writing swings back and forth between "obvious" and "too obscure to care about"--I've found that the written notes I find in the environment vanish from my brain immediately. The visual storytelling, however, is super good. The game opens with a brief cutscene that I found unusually engaging, and there's a bunch of little enviro-storytelling tableaus to find both on the main path and out of the way, in little hidden corners you can discover.
The wall-climbing pickaxes make for some fun puzzles. Often, I can see a tableau or a shimmering collectible off in the distance, but need to crawl all around the walls and study the problem from several angles to figure out how to get there. I highly recommend using the wayfinding command, though--the first time I tried to play the first chapter, I tried to find the critical-path route myself, and was completely unable to. The levels are so large and tall that I was able to get myself way off into the distance on some random geometry. I didn't realize that I wasn't "supposed" to explore that part of the level until I'd already wasted nearly half an hour climbing around there.
I don't regret that time--it taught me a lot of the traversal foundations I needed to move forward, and it was fun to push at the outer boundaries of the game--but I do now frequently use the "H" key to highlight the next critical path waypoint. I want to finish this game, not wander forever near the ceiling, wondering whether I'm on the right track!
I'm still very early in the game and don't have all the traversal tools yet, but I'm going to keep at this one a bit! It reminds me a little bit of my first time with Kairo, which has long been one of my favorite exploration games. They're different genres, really, but both good at setting mood with monumental spaces. I think I love this kind of stuff because it is so far beyond my own skillset and domain expertise in games. Always feels good to see someone tell me a story with mostly just level geometry only!
Heads up--I also am trying out comments on this blog. I've enabled them on this post and on the previous two. I'm using Komments.cloud below. All comments are manually reviewed by me before appearing on the site.