Luna Abyss is a first-person bullet-hell shooter that tells a dark tale in a far future worth visiting. We play as Fawkes, a woman imprisoned and forced to work for a mysterious entity called the “all father” to reduce her prison sentence of 10,000 days.
The work consists of operating what’s apparently a robotic surrogate that the all-father lowers underground to a grim and beautifully harrowing megastructure that looks pretty much inspired by the BLAME! manga by Tsutomu Nihei. Each deed that pleases the all-father will reduce the main character’s prison sentence, and any mistake, like breaking mission equipment, might cause the all-father to extend her sentence.
This is, however, not a reflection of your in-game efficacy, as your campaign will always see the same deductions and additions throughout the playthrough. In the end, seeing our sentence on screen serves mostly as an original progression bar.
In this megastructure, the main character’s work is more precisely that of a “scout,” someone tasked with retrieving specific items or hunting down specific targets, all with the help of a small number of cool weapons and special abilities.
The gameplay loop is rather simple; the player gets to progress through the megastructure’s many twists, platforms, turns, and deep holes. There are several obstacles, some biological and maybe only accidentally there, some definitely there to stop players on their tracks. Once past them, players will enter DOOM Eternal-like arenas that they will only leave after killing all enemies. Needless to say, the arenas get more dangerous and populated as you progress. In these arenas, players will need to use their small but varied arsenal wisely.
I absolutely love the ammo system, which plays out just like the one from the original Mass Effect. Weapons have unlimited ammo; you just have to prevent them from overheating. Should one weapon overheat, players will have to either swap their weapon to one less suited to the battle at hand or wait before they can shoot again with the best one. There’s no scrambling to desperately find an ammo pack. Be wise in how you use your weapon, and you won’t have to worry about anything besides the enemies in front of you (and their myriad deadly projectiles). I’m really glad someone remembers how cool this system was.
There are also collectibles: Resident Evil-style data files left behind by the many deceased that you can read to begin to understand this world, crystals that raise our overall health, and special crystals that give us new abilities that will come in handy to traverse this world, beat enemies more easily, or avoid projectiles.
This is a game as much about exploration as it is about combat, so its world is incredibly important. At the start, I thought the entire game would be mostly dark, only lit in parts by sparsely-placed neon lights. I would’ve been fine with that—so long as the architecture of the derelict megastructure kept on changing—but I was terribly wrong. Way sooner than I expected, the game began to take me to incredibly varied places -of very varied lighting, too, all of them beautiful to the point I feel sad for the artists behind these beautiful and sprawling worlds that many will blaze through in a second and never think about again.
I only have two gripes with the gameplay. One is the aim-lock feature, which is available even when playing on higher difficulty settings. It’s a weird choice, but if you want to make the game as challenging as it can possibly be, you can simply avoid using it. The other, more serious one, is how the combat is never as intense, quick, and satisfying as that of the nu-Doom games, though Luna Abyss totally outdoes Doom in terms of platforming.
Though it’s an action-heavy game, Luna Abyss is also a plot-heavy one. Despite the endless void that constantly embraces the player, we never feel alone, as the plot moves forward and we interact with a peculiar cast of characters, either directly or via Intercom.
Very early on, we might begin to suspect that there could be something wrong with the shadowy holier-than-though-acting entity responsible for imprisoning us and blackmailing us into killing and scavenging for him without telling us why, but I won’t spoil you on where that goes.
The bullet hell genre, the one famous for requiring lightning-quick reflexes out of its daring players, began in the 2D realm. Still, Luna Abyss is clearly just as inspired by 3d titles like Returnal, Nier Automata, the aforementioned new DOOM games, and possibly the underrated indie Lorn’s Lure, which also provides quite the hefty challenge. Just be reminded that, given the genre at hand, the players who stand to enjoy it the most are the ones who’ll brave through it at the hardest difficulty, dodging and repelling hundreds of projectiles at the same time, while finding a way to shoot down the enemies, and throwing them.
Lowering the difficulty will diminish the intended fun as well as the 8-10 hour expected playtime, but the game has great options for people who want to enjoy the game only for its story. These can go as far as to eliminate both the challenges from the combat and platforming side of things. Whatever way you choose to tackle it, the beautiful environments and the cool setpiece-filled megastructure still provide enough fun to make Luna Abyss easy to recommend.
You can now play Luna Abyss on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming (with Game Pass), PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, and PlayStation 5 for $29.99.
