Lumino City 4+

Amazing concept. It’s truly beautiful. I think the game is too easy in some respects - I don’t like that you can’t move backwards. This means that everything you need to solve the current puzzle is in your current screen or just one screen back. In other "item collection games" like King’s Quest, you’d have to carry items in your backpack for ages before they became useful, never really knowing what they were for. I like the mystery of that.

The book is a cool idea but it is full of lorem ipsum pages. It’s easy to get to the right pages using the table of contents, so the act of trying to hide the pages is a tedious step that isn’t really necessary. What would be more interesting is if the pages didn’t give you the complete puzzle answer but more cryptic clues. Some of the pages literally tell you what buttons to push in what order - I’d rather have a hint.

By any reasonable standard, this game is an amazing accomplishment and is utterly worth experiencing. I did encounter some performance problems when running full screen on a Mac Pro that’s a few years old. (Leaving full screen mode worked around my problem. Your mileage may vary.) The obvious comparisons with this game are Machinarium and Monument Valley, which are both extremely accomplished animated stories interrupted by puzzles. Lumino City and Machinarium have fairly similar approaches to the puzzles and are more challenging than Monument Valley. The difference here is that I plain lost patience with Lumino City’s puzzles: like everything else in this game, they LOOK great, but I found most (not all) of them unoriginal, arbitrary and tedious, and eventually resorted to a walk-through to get past many of them to where Lumino City really shines, which is the visuals and design. (A few puzzles, like the Spinning House, are really cool.) I also very much appreciated the finishing touches on this game, which are the lovely 2D animated sequences at the start and finish.

This is a visually intriguing game; based on an unusual concept and well-designed. The story is weak and pretty much hides in the background. I personally find it uninteresting. The puzzles range from easy to practically impossible. There are no hints or clues on what you are supposed to do if you get stuck. There is a help manual, where you have to figure out which page to turn to by solving a math problem, but it just gives you the solution. I have no idea how the binary punchcard puzzle is supposed to work — and I used to be a programmer (and used punchcards a long time ago).

I encountered one serious problem, the crashed and, when I relaunched it, I found myself two puzzles back from where I was when I had started playing. Meaning I had to play the tedius ferris-wheel and guitar puzzles again. The game didn’t periodically save my progress, nor did it save my progress after completing a puzzle. I’m not sure if the crash could be blamed on the game or the OS (as a lot of apps seem to crash lately) but not saving is not cool.