Testing player’s patience and skills with a hardcore platforming game, Glimmer Studio has released their demo on Steam for their upcoming platformer game Lumione. Published by Perfect World Games, they have essentially sent out a challenge to platform players to see if they have what it takes to handle their game. After playing through the demo, and dying plenty of times along the way, I have to say that this is definitely not going to be a game for players of all skill levels.
Gameplay
You start off with the basics, given only the ability to move, jump, and wall jump. After making it a short way in, you will start getting access to more mechanics to keep moving forward. These will include a variety of things, but in the demo, you are given a dash, a bubble that replenishes your dash without having to land, and grab.
Lots of the pathway is shrouded in shards that kill you if touched, so you will need to maneuver your way through various obstacle pathways in order to proceed. Mixing together wall jumps, dashing, clean movement, and the proper use of the strategically placed mechanics (bubble replenish, grab, etc.)
Dash is shown off as the main mechanic in the game due to how versatile they make its use. There will be a sphere that you have to dash into and it will spit you out in a direction you are aiming, you can dash through a solid yellow bar and it will act as a push which you can also land on if there aren’t spikes, and of course, there is the sheer ability to get through sections of the level purely because of the dash.
Expectations
With the few mechanics and level design challenges already in place during the demo, I can only imagine we are going to see a large variety of these throughout the game. I hope they are going to be able to maintain the ability to keep them simple to understand and hard to navigate with because it leaves all the entertainment in the challenging gameplay experience.
It looks like there might be some kind of boss or enemy encounters in the game at some point as well, just based on some of the layouts of certain areas. If these interactions do happen, I hope the way to defeat them or succeed the area is largely based on the platforming skills of the player.
Overall, having such a difficult demo that seems to just be the beginning of the game has made me expect it to just get harder and harder from here. With there being no true punishment for dying countless times in an area, I hope they don’t hold back on their level designing.
Conclusion
Lumione is entertaining through its challenging gameplay! If you are a platformer fan, then this is simply a game you need to play. With a free demo, there really is no reason to not give this game a try yourself. Be ready for some difficult gameplay, but you’ll definitely have a lot of fun getting through it. They are on the right path to get this game out as a successful title and I look forward to playing it when it’s released to verify it lives up to the expectations this demo has left me with.
