A cel-shaded white man with short wavy hair is wearing a vest under an open jacket. He's black and white but the jacket is red. He's standing to the left side, pointing a gun toward the middle of the screen. In the centre is the word "Lunark", stylised across two lines, split as "LUN" and "ARK" in big stone letters. The background is a cyberpunk pixel art city (a screenshot of the game).

First Look @ Lunark

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I’m old enough to actually remember the old games that Lunark counts as influences. How does it measure up to the classics? And does it bring anything new to the table?

A Real 90s Flashback

I still remember playing Flashback on the SNES. It was the first game I ever played that had a proper grounding in realism. Although the story is science fiction, none of the mechanics implied that the main character (why can I remember that his name is Conrad?) had any kind of superhuman abilities. In fact, it was his inability to jump particularly high, survive high falls or absorb a lot of damage that made him interesting.

That is exactly how the protagonist  –  Leo –  feels in Lunark. He doesn’t run super fast or jump super high. You start with only three hit-points, so he’s not a bullet sponge. He feels very human. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. He’s this believable guy thrown into an unbelievable situation. Kind of like Bruce Willis in the first Die Hard. And just like John McClane, you’re also a bit of an outsider in this world. Given that Lunark is a linear, story-driven game I’m going to avoid all possible spoilers and not talk about the specifics here. But the story seems pretty good, and because it’s all text-based the developers have a lot of room to expand without adding a ton of voice lines.

Another World of Improvements

There are always things about older games that don’t gel with the modern day. Limited lives aren’t really a thing any more. We expect better checkpointing than games from the past. Lots of that stuff was a hangover from the old coin-op days and never really fit with the more modern home console and computer gaming spirit.

Canari Games has thankfully recognised this and updated some of the mechanics to bring them more in line with our expectations in 2023. For example, when you want to jump up to grab a platform above you, it doesn’t matter what direction you’re facing — in Flashback and Another World you’d only grab if you were looking towards the edge. I always found that super irritating and I’m glad Lunark doesn’t suffer from that. Checkpoints are pretty well arranged too, and it never felt like I had too much ground to re-tread any time I died.

I feel like maybe there was as little too much “tutorialising” though. By which I mean there were multiple NPCs giving advice on controls way into the second area, by which time I’d already been running and jumping and shooting for quite a while. It felt unnecessary — although you might want to ask me about that when I go back after a few days away, given that my ADHD brain tends to forget that kind of thing super quickly.

A cel-shaded white man with short wavy hair is wearing a vest under an open jacket. He's black and white but the jacket is red. He's standing to the left side, pointing a gun toward the middle of the screen. In the centre is the word "Lunark", stylised across two lines, split as "LUN" and "ARK" in big stone letters. The background is a cyberpunk pixel art city (a screenshot of the game).

And the ‘But’?

No game is perfect, and of course I have some minor issues with Lunark, but mostly regarding movement. Sometimes Leo’s movement can feel a little robotic, as if the individual parts of movement are separated. For example, even though his run isn’t particularly fast, when you try to enter a crouch it takes a few frames to realise, slow down and then go into the animation. This could be entirely deliberate to try and capture that old school style of play. But those slightly disjointed parts caused me to take damage that I otherwise feel like I should have avoided. I’m not saying he needs his run to transition into a slide into cover, but I could use maybe skipping some of the slowing down frames. I’m getting shot at, maybe hurry it up a bit!

There were also a couple of times when I wasn’t sure exactly where I should go. I’d doubled back a couple of times and was making progress, but it turns out to be in the wrong direction. It wasn’t until I was getting annoyed at repeatedly getting stuck that I tried an alternative direction and this turns out to be the proper way to go. In a world populated by NPCs with a lot to say, it would’ve been nice if (after a handful of deaths in the same place) one of them had maybe suggested I try something different. But then again, this could just be my old brain being old and dumb.

Is Lunark Any Good?

Lunark’s flaws seem very minor, all things considered. Canari Games has managed to capture that retro-futuristic world with old school gameplay meeting modern mechanics. Once you adapt your thinking to the style of the game, mechanics that could have been frustrating fade away and you’re left with a really solid action platformer with an interesting story and an absolutely stunning graphical style.

The good:

  • Looks amazing and the rotoscoped animation is incredible
  • Retro mechanics have been brought into the 21st century

The bad:

  • Signposting in a couple of places could use some work
  • Movement maybe isn’t as fluid as I’d like

Buy Lunark:

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