Lunark (2023)

Lunark is a pixel art sci-fi cinematic platformer. It is fairly short, but it was quite good. The animation was particularly excellent with rotoscoped cutscenes. The overall level design is also solid and it has a wide variety of interesting locations. You play in a series of semi-open world levels, which has secrets to find - giving some exploration gameplay. The story is also interesting and well conceived.

The actual gameplay feels pretty clunky, especially the platforming. The character feels very heavy and it has a huge delay on input commands. It still manages to be fun, but I wish it was more responsive.

The game is a bit overpriced and pretty short, but I do wish there were more cinematic platformers being made and I could tell a lot of heart went into it. Probably wait for a sale, but definitely check it out.

Fun little game. I loved the Flashback aesthetic way back when I kickstarted it. Playing it on NS, in a 4K tv didn't do justice to the pixel art. At first it seemed way too... pixel-y. But you get used to it. The story is simple but fun. Nothing too great though, but enough to keep you company. The controls were kinda good, but lacked the responsiveness I would have liked; it reminded me of Flashback in that manner, and not in a good way. The most annoying thing, though, were the checkpoints: oh god. It's good that this game is not that big. The checkpoints are so far apart in some levels, that I had to play the same annoying sequence of puzzles 3-4 times (after dying); the forest levels and the last levels are those that come in mind. The music is good for this kind of game. I didn't like the music in the last levels of the game, as it made the whole process more stressful. The dialogue was kinda simple, and the characters were a bit one one-dimensional, but it didn't bother me that much.

All in all, this is a fun game, but with some problematic points. Even though it is not an indicator of the work and time that has been put into it, I would probably not recommend someone to buy it for the full price; in this day and age where everything is extremely pricey, I would think twice about spending 20€ in a game that takes ~10h to complete, and would require quite a bit of polish to be a worthwhile experience.