Lurruna - The Island of Towering Automatons Review

REVIEW COPY PROVIDED BY DEVELOPER.

In spite of its fervent love for action platformer game design of old, Lurruna wastes no time establishing an identity all its own while still displaying a sharp understanding of what made the classics so compelling. What immediately sets this game apart from its predecessors, aside from an especially inspired visual palette, is its emphasis on bombs as your sole combat tool. While Dafne can throw them in any cardinal direction, bombs are tossed in fixed arcs before detonating on contact with enemies or surfaces. These may sound like subtle differences, but the game gets so much mileage out of these small distinctions and leads to wildly interesting scenarios.

As I alluded to earlier, Lurruna has no sub-weapons in the traditional sense, and this goes a long way towards alleviating some of the frustration that can come up from a reliance on random stage pickups. While some entries in the genre strike a nice balance between their weapons and make the optimal choice depend far more on context or preference, others are less considered in their design. To show you what I mean, lets look at a personal favorite of mine - Ghosts ’n Goblins: Resurrection. This is a game who’s stages are ruthless beyond any reasonable measure, where the player must be intimately familiar with their kit in order to efficiently react to the many variables that get in the way of the end. One element that sets GnG apart from Castlevania is how only one weapon can be held at a time, with pickups in the stage forcing the player to swap to the weapon they collect. This is already a questionable choice on its face, but combine that with the skewed balance of the weapons and the inevitability of accidentally collecting something you don’t want, and it can make you wish you were completely locked to one weapon to avoid these unpredictable nerfs to your kit.

Nothing feels worse than being stuch with a shitty weapon in a Ghosts ’n Goblins game.

In an effort to avoid these potential issues, Lurruna takes an alternate approach to your expanded kit with its battery system. Littered throughout the game are batteries you can stock up on and hoard for the duration of the stage, but rather than acting as ammo for a disconnected sub-weapon, these batteries are used to supercharge your preexisting tools in some clever ways. With each subsequent press of a dedicated button, the player can spend batteries to power up their bomb up to three times, with each level completely shifting the use of the bomb. Level 1 creates a blast that travels in both directions across the entire horizontal length of the screen, Level 2 creates an impact that extends the vertical range of your offense while covering some of your biggest blind spots, and Level 3 turns your bomb into a massive extended explosion that persists while the player is able to move around and keep up the offensive or retreat to safety.

By trimming the fat and reducing your options down to a few strong tools, catastrophic errors more often feel like the players fault rather than unavoidable consequences of a dice roll. To be clear, I take no fundamental issue in games being mean or “unfair” to the player. The nature of games as static pieces of code means its often too easy to ruin a challenge by playing it just a bit too much, so some degree of variability or randomization can go a long way in keeping an experience fresh for an extended period of time. I do enjoy even mean forms of RNG from time to time, but for an action title such as this, I much prefer when the unpredictable elements come from opposing threats more than being bumped into a random weapon you can’t easily switch off of.

Smart bomb usage can be paramount when trying to find opporunities to catch your breath.

Enemies are minimalist in isolation, often sporting one or two types of attack with easily readable styles of movement to fulfill specific roles on the screen, but when layered over top of each other they quickly become far more threatening. Contact damage is the name of the game here, and often the primary threat at any given time time - when playing conservatively with batteries things can get overwhelming quickly, so liberal use of your strong tools is recommended to get through in one piece. It’s not a bad thing that individual enemies are mostly pushovers, because in this style of game, the real meat comes from dealing with overlapping threats that take control of the space to heavily limit your options. Predictably this is where Lurruna’s committal movement tools really come into the picture, and the ways in which this style of play have been expanded are really neat.

Aside from a retreating backflip that’s been lifted wholesale from Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, the player also has access to a long forward roll and something akin to a vertical backflip to gain absurd amounts of height. While these tools undoubtedly expand the effective area of your movement and make it easier to escape in a pinch, their presence serve as a great excuse to stretch platforming out in both the horizontal and vertical fields. While wide chasms and upward ascents are nothing new for the genre, I commend the developer for not being afraid to put some honest-to-goodness platforming in this game. There’s disappearing blocks! There’s a few bosses that take place over bottomless pits! It would have been so easy to play it safe in this regard, but other than a well-considered knockback arc that favors a vertical path rather than harsh blowback, you’ll take more than a few deaths to pits across the game.

The actual terrain of these stages are no slouch either, and this is where bombs really shine. Since your primary method of attack requires direct collision with the game world, various stages play around with this and center the given area around some really clever gimmicks. This can be anything from a falling ceiling of spikes requiring the explosion of a bomb to be pushed up while traversing, to many different levels where the actual environment shifts the mechanics and dynamics of your bomb. In one especially noteworthy late-game endurance test your own bombs are used against you, with sloppy throws resulting in huge pillars of fire filling the screen and getting in the way of screen control (certain enemies can ignite these pillars as well, naturally). It all feels cruel in a way that could only be conjured up by someone intimately familiar with this style of game and is deeply in love with the texture that they can provide, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give.

Just about every way you could imagine bombs interacting with the environment is considered in Lurruna.

The cherry on top for the stage design is a small system level detail where the explosion of bombs will pass through terrain and damage enemies that are otherwise out of reach, resulting in myriad moments where your usable space is limited while being harassed by enemies from all corners of the screen, but still expected to fight back and clear out everything you can. While I would have loved to see one more stage gimmick that gets some heavy use, this yearning comes more from a love of whats present rather than an itch for whats missing. Just about every single spin on the mechanics and small detail in play lead to so many moments of tactical bliss that fall right in line with the genre’s best and remain wholly exciting, even after over 20 hours of play while researching for this review.

Another area of the game that delights is the boss design, and this was one of my big question marks going into Lurruna. PD_CGT’s previous game Disaster Arms was similarly sold on the merit of its boss fights, and their shmup-inspired bullet waves were a blast to tear through with that game’s wide set of tools, but many of those fights were large and stationary while pointing the player’s focus more on the spread of their bullets. Given that Lurruna sports a character with minimal movement tools and no easy way to gain invincibility I was curious to see what the approach would be here, but to be honest, there’s not much of a formula to be found. So many different styles of fight are experimented with, from large automatons that fill the screen with garbage to more mobile foes that force the player into committal actions to dodge safely, and plenty that get additional mileage out of the aforementioned gimmicks that adjust your bomb properties. Even in specific encounters that can be “scripted” a bit more easily with well placed pulse bombs to tear through phases before certain attacks can even be pulled, the emphasis on utilizing the entirety of the screen space despite your limited movement is something I greatly appreciate.

Boss fights also act as one final place to dump your stock of batteries before the end of the stage wipes them away, but not without a catch. Any leftover batteries after finishing a given stage will be dumped into an ever-growing reserve, with an additional life being granted for every 20 batteries you take to the end. This can be stacked more than once per stage (On my best runs of stage 1 I can get around 4 additional lives immediately), and crucially, is a presented in place of any alternative method of scoring for extends. I’m all for giving the player some ludicrous method of scoring that integrates directly into survival (see shmups like Battle Garegga), but more often than not these systems can come with some caveats.

This midgame highlight is a great showcase for how a unique arena layout, mobile boss, and well-considered gimmick can amplify an encounter.

Allowing the player to score for survival can open the door for some really degenerate styles of play, whether that be scoring exploits not accounted for, milking strategies that suck the momentum out of an encounter, or even the encouragement of a slow playstyle that forces players to clear out every single enemy to maximize their score, lest they want to turn in a sub-optimal result. A well designed scoring system can still have safeguards against these drawbacks (Super Monkey Ball’s scoring calculations through time bonuses and Bananas collected make for a system that requires more thought than just picking up everything you see), but by completely removing it as an element to balance, Lurruna is able to focus entirely on moment-to-moment gameplay in the name of survival first that feels remarkably elegant.

By acknowledging the secondary value of batteries, it can be easy to second guess how you’re spending them and begin playing far more passively than your kit is capable of. Passive play can quickly allow more enemies to swarm in than you’d like, resulting in scrambles that lead to unnecessary damage or even death, so depending on your skill level theres a balance to strike between how much you’re saving versus how much you’re cashing in. The three expendable bomb types at your disposal can be absolutely devastating and are far more powerful than their relatively low cost may initially suggest, but by giving them a slight amount of additional utility, there’s an added level of weight and consideration to each one you decide to use and makes them feel far more meaningful than they may appear otherwise.

Even the method of collecting batteries has some knock-on effects to how you view the balance of bombs. While other entries in the genre generally divide their health and ammo pickups into distinct locations that don’t change between playthroughs, boxes found in Lurruna burst with multiple pickups at once while swapping out batteries for health pickups if the player isn’t topped off (barring dedicated sections that give the player batteries outside of item containers). In essence, taking damage doesn’t just cost health, but also future batteries as well. Does this mean the player has to weigh the amount of damage they take from an attack compared to how many batteries it would take to dispatch an enemy safely? Not necessarily, but the opportunity cost for frivolous play is a small touch that gives the systems holding up the game an extra bit of flavor that I adore.

Stocking up on extra batteries in the early stages is a great way to make the endgame a lot more managable.

Ultimately, the real benefit to this system is how it influences the experience of learning the game and how it distinguishes players of varying skill levels. The more cautious or inexperienced may prioritize safety to ensure they get enough extends to take on the tougher late-game challenges, but as they become more comfortable, they may feel more more inclined to take greater long-term risk for more immediate gains and quicker traversal. In essence, higher levels of skill are naturally rewarded with more engaging gameplay. I’m already finding myself reaping the benefits of this system as I’m getting more consistent with clears on the higher difficulties, and I would imagine this will continue to hold true for a long time to come.

And besides, even if the the base game wasn’t enough for you, theres a plethora of added goodies to dig around in once you’re past the meat of the experience, including a TLB hidden beyond Practice mode, a Kirby-style boss rush, and a hard mode that, to borrow a word from the developer, is just gonna off you. I’ve managed to get a 1CC of Professional mode and feel pretty comfortable with the game generally, but at the time of writing, EX mode is something I have not even come close to conquering. While deep familiarity of the “normal” modes will make previously tricky sections really manageable, EX mode takes the core flow of the game and cranks it up to 11 from the very jump, with roughly twice as many enemies, more aggressive AI, and even new tricks up the boss’s sleeves. It is deeply evil in a way I’m totally enamored with, and I’m excited to eventually get a clear of it.

While the inspirations behind PD_CGT’s previous output were deeply engrained into their very being, the most admirable and surprising quality of Lurruna is just how well it stands on its own merits. The genre pitch is more of a blank slate to build off of rather than a complete template, and this is apparent in all corners of its design. The balance of its resource economy adds weight to potentially frivolous combat decisions, its thorny stage layouts and aggressive hazards push the player movement to its limits while opening the door for some really flashy play, and the stripped-down scoring feeds back into the battery system and lets the actual flow of gameplay speak for itself. There’s never a single moment that feels derivative of the past, every element feels like it’s in service of pushing the genre forward with elegance and flair. It’s truly classic in every sense of the word.