A pixel-art sci-fi adventure set in the midst of a rebellion against a totalitarian regime, LUNARK is a modern take on the 2D cinematic platformer genre of the ‘90s. Run, jump, hang, climb, roll, and shoot your way through gorgeous and mysterious locations!
GAME FACTS
TITLE: Lunark
RELEASE DATE: 4/5/2023
MSRP: $19.99
DEVELOPER: Canari Games
PUBLISHER: Wayforward
PLATFORMS: Xbox, PlayStation, Switch and PC
PLAYED ON: PlayStation 5
As Leo, a courier with unique abilities and a mysterious past, you’ll run, jump, hang, climb, roll, and shoot through gorgeously animated pixel-art environments ranging from a dystopian megalopolis to eerie caves to an alien forest.
You must overcome traps, solve puzzles, earn upgrades, and battle enemy droids, and when you’re not fighting for survival, you’ll meet a cast of colorful characters who will put Leo’s allegiances to the test.
Uncover the dark origin of humanity’s new home and the truth about yourself in an epic sci-fi adventure!
CLASSIC CONNECTIONS
Lunark is very heavily inspired by the seminal 1992 classic, Flashback: The Quest for Identity, developed by Delphine Software and published by U.S. Gold.
Flashback, in turn, was a spiritual successor to 1991’s Out of this World, also developed by Delphine Software and published by U.S. Gold (or as it was known outside of North America: “Another World”).
Much like in Lunark, in Flashback you control your character in a 2D environment with very deliberate smoothly animated moves, with rotoscoped-looking realistic animations. In Flashback you had a complicated control scheme to navigate in order to run, jump, climb and fight your way to freedom. While Lunark is very obviously inspired by Flashback, luckily its developers didn’t stick too closely to the Flashback control scheme, making Lunark much easier to control and more enjoyable to play overall.
GAMEPLAY IMPRESSIONS
As I reflected on my time playing Lunark, I feel like gameplay and controls will either make or break the game experience for modern gamers.
On the one hand, if you were a fan of Flashback back in the day and had little to no issue with its controls, you will find Lunark is a much improved but similar experience. Personally, I always liked the idea of Flashback’s control scheme, but found it difficult to execute in practice. Lunark, on the other hand, employs similar controls but executes them in a way that is much easier to understand and execute (at least to me).
On the other hand, if you’ve never played Flashback, or you didn’t like the way it controlled, Lunark may have a bit of a learning curve for you, which you may or may not click with.
In terms of replayability, Lunark does offer a variety of items to find, and if you wanted to get 100% of all secrets and power-ups you might need at least two playthroughs, otherwise its about a 4.5-5 hour game, with limited reasons for replay.
Lunark’s overly chunky graphics may also be a little hit or miss for gamers.
I’m a hardcore retro gamer through and through, but even for me, the chunky pixel-art in the game seemed a bit too lo-fi for my taste. Personally, I wish the graphic detail was closer to a game like Flashback, but I got used to look of the graphics quickly, and the smooth animations and well-designed environments more than made up for it.
The story is the stereotypical kind of typical dystopian future with a totalitarian government, robots and AIs, but overall I liked it and it kept me interested.
Thankfully the writing is well done and the text is just detailed enough to help support the narrative, but not overly detailed to the point where you’ll want to skip ahead.
I honestly found the writing length to be perfect and I wish more modern games with text-based dialog would do something similar.
The music and sound design is one area where Lunark really shines. I absolutely love the music in Lunark and it not only perfectly calls back to the style of Flashback (in a very good way) but it really stands on its own to support the action and be very enjoyable. While I don’t think I’ll be looking to purchase the OST, it is perfect in the game itself.
From an innovative standpoint, Lunark heavily relies on its inspiration, but executes it in an absolutely flawless way. While it may seem simple enough to emulate a classic experience, Lunark improved the Flashback-style control scheme to the point where its actually playable, while I still can’t control Flashback well to this day. Kudos to the devs for that!
At an MSRP of $19.99 and a length of about 4.5-5 hours, for me Lunark teeters right on the edge of delivering sufficient enough value for its price. When I finally got around to buying Lunark, I was able to get it on sale at a significant discount ($3.99 versus its full $19.99 price), and I’m sure that helped make my experience more enjoyable over all. If I had paid full price I might have expected more from the experience (for example, Hollow Knight Silksong retailed for $19.99 at release and could be seen as a more robust experience).
SCORE: 8/10
Lunark is a really well made tribute to the cinematic platforming games of the 90s, like Flashback and Out of This World. While its graphics are a little blockier than I typically like my pixel-art, it still looks fantastic, and plays even better than the games that inspired it. If you liked games like Flashback back in the day, you definitely need to give Lunark a try. If you never played the games that inspired it, it’s still worth giving it a go, although you may find the controls to be a bit odd and want to wait for a sale before jumping in.
SAMPLE GAMEPLAY
You can watch my beginning gameplay on PS5 in the video below: