IOS highlight: Lumino City

A City on the verge of a puzzle breakthrough

The first thing you'll likely to notice about Lumino City is its visuals. Now I know, us gamers all like to pretend that visuals don't matter and games can be amazing while still looking rough, but cor blimey! Not only is Lumino City easy on the eyes it also has a brillo art design and a unique visual style - the whole game world being created in real life by hand, then framed and lit for in game scenes. There's a slight stop motion and origami feel to the city, whenever the camera sweeps over into the next scene, the jaw can't help but drop slightly.

I wish our City had a snazzy sign like that.... Or at least a sign at all.

At the core though the game is a point and click puzzler, tasking you with inventory puzzles ala classic point and click game logic, though nowhere near as obtuse as a chicken pulley or fire extinguishers on beavers. Charming enough the game starts when your grandad is snatched from his home during story time, leading you in search through the city. Story is told through text dialogue and  visual cues, though it's not exactly Life is Strange in terms of the level of storytelling it still has a certain pull. The denizens of Lumino City are a charismatic bunch and often require you to help them before they'll return the favour, which often leads to actual logic based puzzles. I've never been a huge fan of the puzzles in these games that require you to move cogs around or find the odd thing out, tedious comes to mind. It's the problem I had with Machinarium and some of the puzzles in Broken Sword, they often just lead to spending ages just randomly pressing things until it's right. It's not so bad here and the game even gives you a nicely disguised handbook which contains from what I've seen 900 pages! Most of the pages are just nice architecture plans but the contents page points to puzzle hints.

No this isn't an Alien spaceship

As with any of these games, the length depends on how long puzzles take you, even so the game has a decent chunk of content with nearly 20 chapters/ levels - each set in a different area. Special mention needs to go out to what is often overlooked which is the sound design and music. Rewarding musical cues and a soothing, laid back soundtrack makes this the perfect game to just kick your feet up when you need downtime from killing people (and killing people in games too). Unfortunately on to some issues, though not very numerous they are still there. Here's a nitpick, the speech bubbles are too intrusive, ugly and take up too much space. There I found a con to the game, took me a while. I can't see it being an issue for many but as someone who appreciates design and style fitting sleekness - things like that always bug me. Elsewhere I encountered some spelling and grammar errors (here's where people ironically point out some in this review) and one instant of not being able to open my inventory. Not much negative to find here, if you're a fan of puzzle or point and click adventure games - give this lighthearted little romp through a hand crafted world a go.