Luna Abyss is a first-person-shooter platformer that immediately grabs your attention with its distinct art style. It's very dark with splashes of blue and red lights guiding your way through the abyss. It isn't all just dark doom and gloom, though, and there are levels that feature large open areas with more natural lighting and lots of other surprises. The blue and red lights are definitely present throughout, but the whole game isn't just black corridors like the first chapter. I genuinely love the way Luna Abyss looks. It's gorgeous.
The story is, well, complicated. Your character gets sent to a prison on the moon because reasons and the moon has a huge megastructure inside it called the abyss that used to be a colony but it got destroyed. Now prisoners get sent into the abyss to find resources and do ... stuff. Your character is special, somehow, and is the key to unraveling the tragedies that led to the downfall of the colony.
I have to say that while I love the setup, the actual story in the game kinda sucks. This is one of those games where the bulk of the vital story details are told through journals scattered all over the world and the limited cutscenes and conversations you have during gameplay don't really tell you what's going on at all. Which means I have no idea what happened because I'm not reading goddamned text journals. Optional journals and library entries are by far the absolute worst way to tell your story, game developers. Stop doing it. Practically no one cares enough to read any of it.
The storytelling is the only real complaint I have with Luna Abyss, though. Thankfully, the presentation and gameplay are more than enough to compel you to keep playing even if you aren't following the story. The game is a blend of BioShock and Doom 2016 and Metroid Prime and Nier and doesn't try to hide these influences at all, but it puts it all together into something unique. The platforming and exploration is like Metroid Prime. The world and story are very much like BioShock. The combat is very reminiscent of modern Doom but with arenas full of enemies blasting glowing balls of death like a bullet hell shmup. And the dystopian setting and characters you meet are all right out of Nier. It's legit a bunch of my favorite things all smashed together and I love it.
I also love that the game offers a ton of accessibility options that don't affect achievements. You can make the combat extremely easy - as in you take no damage - and can skip platforming sections entirely if you want. I love having options and will freely admit I made the combat easier. I just flat out don't play games for challenge and mostly just want to see pretty graphics and look at cool stuff. It's all optional - you do you and have fun. I've seen some forum posters bemoaning granular difficulty options like this because it takes away the quote "shared experience" of everyone playing the same game the same way. I think that whole concept is 1. selfish, and 2. a bullshit fantasy that doesn't actually exist in the first place whether there are difficulty options or not, but that's a rant for a different video. I appreciate that Luna Abyss has these options. You can use them or not if you want. The game is still great either way.
Finally, I want to address the controversy that alt-right chuds have decided to review bomb Luna Abyss over. There is one singular sentence about pronouns in the game that got certain losers undies all twisted because they think it makes the game "woke" and "DEI" or something. How about you all shut the fuck up? I'll admit that it's a throwaway line that doesn't affect the story or characters or anything whatsoever and seems to have been thrown in just to virtue signal, but it's also totally harmless and no one with a functioning brain should give a shit about it. If you're such a delicate snowflake that you refuse to play a game because of one line, you really, really need to touch grass. And if you have a problem with me saying that, then GTFO and don't watch this channel. It's as simple as that.
Sorry to get dramatic, but I hate seeing chuds ruining everything, especially over something as benign as this. Anyway, Luna Abyss is awesome and genuinely one of my favorite things I've played so far in 2026. It looks amazing and the gameplay is excellent - whether you adjust the difficulty or not - and while the storytelling isn't stellar, the overall setting itself and the crazy stuff you experience more than makes up for it. I highly recommend you play Luna Abyss. It's on PC, PS5, and Xbox for $30 and it's totally worth it. Or, you can play it via Xbox Game Pass. Definitely play it, though.
Comments
Post a Comment