LUNIUM

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

The thing about escape-room inspired games is that you can’t think about them too hard, or they suffer narrative collapse. Like, okay, you’re stuck in a cell of some kind, sure – sometimes there’s a more-or-less-contrived reason the baddie would do that instead of just kill you, sometimes there isn’t, but that’s a sufficiently common genre situation that it’s not too hard to swallow. But instead of one normal lock that keeps you in (and that presumably would have had to be opened to put you there in the first place), there’s a system of like half a dozen different interlocking mechanisms that all need to align? And there just happen to be clues scattered around that make the puzzles solvable, but not too trivially so? There’s no way to rationalize this kind of setup, so instead of being a killjoy clearly you’re supposed to just turn off that part of your brain and enjoy the puzzles.

Major, major points to LUNIUM, then, that I think it basically works? It’s got all the trappings of the genre: you wake up with amnesia, chained to the wall in a room chock-a-block with paintings with mystical symbolism, scraps of paper with numbers and letters scrawled on them, turgidly-written pages of your diary that you can recover piecemeal, and a ticking-clock conceit that requires you to escape before the dawn so that you can stop the killer who trapped you from claiming their next victim. It even adds a layer of complexity by requiring you to deduce the identity of the baddie from a list of suspects to get the best ending, in addition to unlocking the final door so you can escape (I mentioned liking this structure in my Mayor McFreeze and Death on the Stormrider reviews, and I think it works well here too). And yet, when I got to the end and figured out what was going on – it actually all kind of made sense and held together! True, I haven’t gone back and rigorously tested the diegetic plausibility of every single bit of the design, but that’s an unfair standard to inflict on a piece of IF; at least as to the broad strokes, each of these bits of contrived escape-room logic hold up, and in fact things couldn’t have gone any other way!

The elegance here goes beyond the narrative, though. This is one attractive Twine game, with moody illustrations conveying a vibe as well as critical clues if you zoom in to enjoy the artwork, and the interface makes it simple to fiddle with the various safes, locks, and other paraphernalia on display. There are also well-integrated hints (plus straight-up solutions, if you need them), though many players might not need them given the well-judged clueing. There’s a nice range of puzzles here, and if they’re not especially thematic, they’re solidly designed and offer some good variety, so no particular approach overstays its welcome: there are of course a number of code-deciphering puzzles, but some are exercises in pure logic, others rely on deductive reasoning that lend a mystery-solving vibe to proceedings, and a few require a bit of lateral thinking, which lead to some satisfying aha moments while still being eminently fair. I’m not the best escape-room puzzler-solver in the world, but I only needed to go to the hints twice: once when the small screen of my phone meant I couldn’t make out an important clue (though I should say that unlike many graphically-rich Twine games, LUNIUM generally works a treat on mobile), and a second time when I’d mixed up two character’s names and therefore didn’t realize I’d already gotten the solution to the puzzle, I was just implementing the solution wrong.

As for the plot, I don’t want to say too much lest I spoil the fun reveal I alluded to above. As is typical for escape rooms, there isn’t much in ongoing narrative, but there is some backstory to discover, and this is parceled out judiciously in between bouts of puzzle-solving. As a Victorian detective, you’re on the trail of a serial killer, and while the outline is quite generic, there’s enough detail given about your previous investigations of the key suspects to give them at least a whiff of personality. There are also some specific themes that keep recurring, like an omnipresent moon motif to go along with the game’s title. As a result it’s enjoyable to read the various document-facsimiles provided, even when you’re largely skimming them looking for clues to the puzzles. This is helpful because it’s this non-puzzle-relevant information that provides the prompts needed to guess the identity of the killer, and while I got to the end with only a tentative guess at whodunnit, the ending prompts pushing me to make my accusation provided another subtle hint or two that let me feel very clever for ultimately fingering the right suspect.

LUNIUM isn’t perfect – I noticed one small bug, where I got some text mentioning the contents of my pockets after I freed myself from the wall despite not having had a chance to look in them yet. But that’s an incredibly minor issue, and I honestly am having trouble dredging up any additional constructive criticism (the writing could be a little more authentically Victorian, I guess? Really though it’s just fine for the purpose it serves). This is an assured game, playable and narratively satisfying in a way I didn’t think I was even allowed to hope an escape room game could be. So I guess that’s my other criticism: it may have spoiled me for other games in the subgenre by making it harder for me to look past it when they don’t make any sense!