Lumo gameplay series#

You’ve probably spent years playing games and Lumo trusts you to use those instincts to figure things out. Secrets may not be everywhere but they’re more than common enough to make it worth paying attention to every part of the scenery, just in case there’s something there. There’s no explanation for any of the wizard’s abilities, and it’s up to the player to figure out that the jump works just fine on the large bubbles rising up from the watery depths, or if it looks like there might be a secret exit in a room it’s worth exploring a bit to see there’s a path to access it.

That’s important because experimentation is the key to figuring out everything. Even losing a necessary prop to clear a room is easily corrected by leaving and returning, because the point of Lumo’s rooms is for each one to be a little puzzle rather than a punishment for experimentation. Miss a jump and fall into the poisoned water, walk into a spike trap, or get toasted by a spinning flame, it all works out fine in the end.

Lumo gameplay series#

It doesn’t sound like much but Lumo is a platformer to its very core, and this opens up the levels and access to the dozens of secrets they hide.Įach area in Lumo is built from a series of rooms, and in the standard gameplay mode death simply resets the room and sees the wizard back at the door he entered from, none the worse for wear. After a few simple rooms and possibly exploring a dead end, if you ignore the giant red arrow painted on the wall, the young wizard finds the first of the two power-ups available in the form of a properly video-game like jump ability. A baby-faced wizard teleports into the opening chamber of a giant dungeon complex, and initially he’s got no powers beyond a gentle hop.

More than just a retrospective, Lumo is a wonderful platforming adventure in its own right. Games like Solstice and Landstalker simply wouldn’t have been the same with the camera set up differently, but eventually true 3D graphics spelled the end for the isometric platformer until Lumo decided to take a trip down memory lane. It was a little tricky on the controller, thanks to the angled view either requiring very good diagonals or having the player mentally adjust so that down was down-left, right was down-right, etc, but it was still the best way to communicate where things were in 3D space using 2D art. The easiest way to create a fake 3D world, back before polygons and the moveable camera, was through the isometric perspective.