Lunistice review

Lunistice harks back to the era of 32-bit mascot platformers. Given the game’s exceedingly reasonable price, putting up with the intermittent misstep is tolerable.  

Premium-priced gaming receives a disproportionate amount of our attention. But sporadically, an economically priced indie title arrives, challenging the dominant business model. That’s the case with solo developer A Grumpy Fox’s Lunistice. With an extremely reasonable five-dollar price, stylish visuals, and gameplay influenced by three-dimensional platformers of the 32-bit era, Lunistice extends a charismatic proposition.

Wisely, the title doesn’t squander its time with protracted exposition. After a few lines of narration provide a suitably oblique context, players assume control of Hana the Tanuki. Like many of the platformer mascots of the last millennium, Hana’s navigational abilities help define the character, and it’s inferred that some of her predecessors weren’t as agile.

She’s a particularly agile raccoon dog, able to jump, double-jump, and even extend the length of the latter with a spin attack. While she’s armed with an offensive attack, Hana isn’t particularly aggressive. Much of the time it’s easier to avoid Lunistice’s enemies than to confront them head-on. And there are no boss battles either, adding to the serene nature of Hana’s trek.

Lunistice undoubtedly excels at reimagining the 90s platformer. Gone are the restrained draw distances and sputtering framerates. Arguably, the game’s standout feature is its engine, which delivers deliciously low-poly worlds at a sinuous, sixty frame-per-second refresh rate. Each of the game’s seven stages is split into two parts. Most flaunt verticality, with a succession of platforms stretching high into the sky, offering the same kind of dazzling panoramic views as SEGA’s Super Monkey Ball series.

Much like AiAi’s exploits, the increasingly perilous platforms are engulfed areas where you will fall to your doom as well as plenty of leap-of-faith cliffs that can provide concealed shortcuts. Mostly, you’ll follow a breadcrumb trail of over 100 origami cranes. But levels aren’t linear and occasionally you’ll see a junction where the collectibles fork in divergent directions.

But if you follow Robert Frost’s lead and pursue the sky-road less taken, it can be difficult to reorient yourself. Levels are quite sprawling and finding your way back to the preceding junction of paper cranes can be difficult until you familiarize yourself with Lunistice’s stages. While control is responsive, occasionally the game gets a bit too finicky.  Early on, a bubble transports Hana to a different area. Players are expected to quickly react and double-jump to another nearby bubble, but the game’s camera doesn’t provide any guidance. Later on, landing on rails requires a bit too much precision, leading to some frustrating falls. Sure, you can slow the protagonist’s movement speed, but doing so also limits the span of your jump.

Fortunately, Lunistice provides plenty of torii gate-style checkpoints as well as an unlimited number of attempts. That said, the number of mistakes factors into your end-of-level grade. So, if you’re hoping to play as the game’s unlockable characters, there’s no room for error. Additionally, exploration is required when collecting the four-letter icons which correspond to the letters in Hana’s name. Gathering these rewards plays with a bit of additional, but wholly optional backstory.

A journey through Lunistice’s levels will take most players about two hours. However, the incentives associated with completing a level without falling and finding every paper crane can escalate that figure. Some of that time will be frustrating, as you narrowly miss a jump or misjudge the elevation of a walkway. Lunistice does so much to improve the visual quality of the 32-bit platformer, that it’s slightly disappointing that the developer didn’t refine the mechanics of navigation.

Lunistice was played on Switch with review code provided by the publisher.