Luna Abyss immediately states what kind of game it will be in the opening scene. The haunting music gets louder and louder as a camera slowly pans to show the curvature of the Earth. And then, in an instant, it’s not just the Earth. A blood-red moon appears above her, corrupted messages filled with static electricity flood the screen. The appearance of this red orb has triggered a massive, undisclosed change in the world, but you are thrust into a gray, dreary civilization that has already experienced whatever that change is.
Luna Abyss, like many of my favorite games, is an oppressive mix of sci-fi story and hellish action. I loved how games like Nier Automata and Saros mixed the crushing tension of hellish projectile barrages with smooth, fluid action combat or third-person shooting. An FPS with this same kind of mix seems entirely appropriate to me, but Luna Abyss is taking its time getting there. Within the first hour or so of the game, I was quite disappointed with the simplicity of the combat and gameplay. Instead of aiming down sights or having an alternate weapon, Luna Abyss gives you a magnetic lock on the nearest enemy that looks a lot like Metroid Prime in function. This doesn’t affect your damage or movement speed at all, you can simply choose to abandon aiming and auto-shoot enemies if you want. The goal here was probably to create a way to make the gunplay feel manageable or, at worst, secondary to moments of dodging bullets – in fairness, Saros excels in part thanks to the heavy auto-aim that many weapons give you.
Eventually, you unlock a second weapon that destroys light shields, and enemies start spawning with these shields, adding a mid-battle weapon swap challenge. Further into the game, shields of different colors, corresponding to additional weapon types, appear and you gain additional combat abilities, such as a health-restoring finishing move. Even then, the lock system feels like a crutch in Luna Abyss. I don’t feel rewarded using it so much as I feel bored, since other games like Doom Eternal trust me to handle aiming, dodging, and resource management on my own.
Dodging in this game isn’t very enjoyable either. It’s a bit slow and sluggish most of the time. Fights with regular enemies end up feeling more like puzzles as you pair weapons to fight specific shield colors. Rather than the free-form jazz of using whatever weapons you have access to, you’re slotted into very specific patterns that end up feeling more like boredom.
Combat is most brilliant during boss fights. On the one hand, the scale of these meetings is incredible. Luna Abyss has a gorgeous art style, driven largely by the use of dark shadows and moody lighting that adds a pinch of horror gaming to some of the environments and enemies you discover. Boss fights also often rely more on dodging projectiles than I expected this game to feature. You’re free to use whatever weapons suit you best, but you’re better off being able to dodge and weave between walls of multi-colored energy beams and fireballs. They’re incredibly fun and extremely challenging, and easily the highlights of the game.
While the moment-to-moment battles aren’t always exciting, I was happy to breeze through these encounters for the reward of uncovering the game’s story and getting closer to the next weird and wild cutscene. There’s a strange, poetic energy to the way characters speak in Luna Abyss, and the game keeps you on the edge of your seat with narrative moments that hint at things but only slowly trickle out direct answers. This makes the journey to reach the end so exciting and so nerve-wracking. Just as the art direction sometimes mimics the feel of a horror game, the slow descent into a certain uncertainty that plays out in the narrative mirrors some of my favorite recent releases like Signalis.
Luna Abyss isn’t a perfectly polished action shooter. In some cases, it even goes out of its way to make action and shooting as simple as possible, unless you’re fighting a massive boss. Despite this, there is so much charm and personality in the way the game is presented and its story is told. It contains a mix of grandiose visuals and a strange and intimate indie game story that kept me in suspense until the very end.
