There’s a married couple who aren’t talking as the husband’s forgotten their anniversary (and lost his trousers), a ship’s captain who’s been driven crazy by the absence of the high seas and a postman depressed by the state of his cold liquorice tea, to name but a few. Their dialogue is engaging, witty and downright funny throughout, with every character you meet feeling fully realised. ![]() However, it’s the residents of Lumino City that Lumi meets while patching up the city and searching for her missing patriarch that really show just how good the writing is. Initially this seems like all there really is to the plot, but little hints are dropped throughout about something slightly more complex going on, which is tied up neatly by an ending manages to seem both incredibly surprising and incredibly obvious with hindsight. He is, unfortunately, kidnapped at the start of the game, and Lumi sets off to rescue him. This extremely helpful manual was handed down to Lumi by her grandfather, and it’s the relationship between these two that drives the game’s narrative, even if you barely get to meet her grandfather. These are all pretty simple, requiring you to count the number of some object from your surroundings and do some simple arithmetic, but they stop you peeking ahead, and provide just enough of a barrier to entry that you won’t rely on the clues. Lumi, the main character, carries a manual with her that gives clues to how to solve your current predicament, although there is a catch: the book is getting on for a thousand pages, so to find the relevant entry you’ll need to use the contents page, which is encoded with numerical puzzles. If there ever is a puzzle that stumps you then don’t worry, the game features a rather neat contextual help system. While the difficulty curve does seem to take a random dip towards simplicity at points, this is generally when you’ve got a simple puzzle that’s part of a larger chain of puzzles, justifying the ease with which its completed. No, like the best puzzle titles Lumino City requires you to use your brain to progress, with well thought out puzzles that range in difficulty, and technological level, from cracking a padlock to programming a computer with punch cards. While some puzzles do require you to find an object, they’re always nearby, and they’re only a part of the larger puzzle. The upside of this is that you’re never forced to revisit an NPC for the tenth time now that you have whatever random item they desire, or to collect objects to mash together into some obscure solution to a puzzle. ![]() Instead the path through the game is very linear, and only once do you sort of return to an earlier area, and even then it’s only for about thirty seconds. There isn’t, for example, any real exploration mechanic, which could be rather nice given the effort that’s gone into crafting this world. This is rather fortunate as there’s not really much else to the game beyond its puzzles. ![]() Puzzles are at the core of the gameplay in the same way a sausage is at the core of a hot dog – there’s some others bits there but they’re not what you’re here for.
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