Bureaucracy is an infinitely recursive prison, is a thought that’s found me on days trapped on the phone to the council being shuffled between departments. Luna Abyss evokes Returnal, Metroid Prime, and the whale-belly vast, maddeningly intricate megastructures of manga Blame!, but I found its sharpest horrors in the places where it reminded me of works like Gilliam’s Brazil – of the Foucauldian nightmares that unfold when we get the bright idea that entropy and chaos can be resisted if we just establish enough protocols. It’s a story about shape and order being forced on the intangible, brought to life through environmental art that does a damn fine job of giving monstrous shape to some equally intangible terrors.
You are Fawkes, shipped off to serve a 25 year sentence in moon jail for mystery crimes (“moon jail for mystery crimes” is also where I tell people I’ve been when I’m too lazy to respond to messages). She soon meets Aylin, a gigantic, alabaster-hued head hanging from rubber snake body that promises to reduce Fawkes sentence if she jacks in to the infinite abyss at the moon’s core through an avatar and gets to work scavenging lost technology. You can view Fawkes’ sentence – 9000 days – in the menu, and it’ll pop up when you complete objectives. It’s a slight yet wonderfully sardonic detail. Fawkes’ plight feels absurd. Small objectives offer paltry concessions of 10 days each, but the true weight of years reveals itself when she goes to sleep at night. The screen goes black save the tally, and you watch it tick down by a single day.
Fawkes’ initially simple tasks soon unearth hints of a grander tragedy, and a very real biological rot festering throughout the abyss. What went wrong down here? Why did so many people come here willingly, and why are indentured Boschian robots and axe-faced feline hellbeasts chatting to me in calm, folksy regional British dialects? It’s a strange, fascinating setting with perhaps a few too many disparate threads and influences to ever coalesce into a truly convincing and complete vision. Norse mythology blends with a snowglobe vision of a neo-Victorian London, but while you can pick out the bits that feel like Bloodborne, like Nier Automata, like Giger or Berserk, the excitable way Luna Abyss arranges its magpie nest feels celebratory rather than cynical.
If, like me, you played the game’s demo and wanted more of the same, I’d better clarify something: you’ll spend just as much time exploring and platforming here as you will shooting. Probably a bit more, actually. It’s a structural choice that sacrifices pacing in the name of sheer vibes. When enemies are on screen, protagonist Fawkes in an anime hero – dashing, strafing, hopping, and never missing a shot thanks to weapon lock-ons that let you focus entirely on avoiding screens full of projectiles. But in Luna Abyss’s quieter moments, she’s a rat in a maze. The maze is alive, and went insane long before she got here. I’m tempted to call its environments and creatures biomechanical, but they feel more like expressions of an individual machine consciousness that’s intricate and interconnected enough to evoke biological complexity without outright mimicking it.
The game is serviceable as a platformer, if never especially strong, but it earns its focus on dashy, grapply aerial navigation by offering up spaces that feel impossible to traverse by any means other than superhuman. The Abyss is made of claustrophobic innards and gaping chasms that exude indifference, if not outright scorn, for Fawkes’ comparatively minute presence. Traversal can be a chore at times, but the Abyss’s imposing, sickly grandeur would ring false if it wasn’t. Perspective can might tight jumps tricky, but controls are smooth, and when things come together, Fawkes crosses gargantuan spaces in uninterrupted bursts of flowing acrobatics.
The ratio is still a bit skewed, though. Combat is the strongest part of the game, and there’s just not enough of it. It’s a problem of variety and evolution rather than purely frequency. It feels like developer Kwalee Labs knew they’d have to parcel fights out so they didn’t get old before the game’s six hour runtime was over. But any favours this does pacing is replaced by lengthy navigation puzzles, and it leaves the game feeling either hesitant or unable to build on its most exciting element.
There are four weapons in total, effectively assault and sniper rifles, a shotgun, and a rocket launcher. Each has a lock-on that only occasionally develops a mind of its own and targets something you didn’t intend, but they’re generally tight enough that you don’t have to think about aiming at all, only evasion and target priority. Whose filling the screen with the most projectiles here? How can I make things just a little less chaotic for myself? A few rough boss spikes aside, Luna Abyss ramps up difficulty smoothly. You’re rarely so overwhelmed that things become unmanageable, but you never have quite enough breathing room to break focus.
A sore spot here is enemy variety. There are maybe seven distinct types in total, plus a few variants that require you to say, switch to the shotgun to break a blue glowing shield before doing any damage. It’s a sparse enough menagerie to be noticeable several times throughout the campaign. In the game’s credit, it did frequently read my mind by introducing a new foe as soon as I started to get tired of fighting the same configurations. But the low weapon count, limited enemy roster, and infrequency of combat itself all contributes to a sense that Luna Abyss stretches itself thin to reach an already short runtime.
What Luna Abyss can’t quite reach in either breadth of depth of combat, however, it shores up with atmosphere. Combat often starts by alerting a shrieking construct named Mother Eyes, plunging still arenas into chaos when you arrive. Spinning, strobe-light like machine appendages bleed red like a disco ball in its death throes, as waves of creatures and constructs spill in. Gritty, harsh bass wobbles and mixes with apocalyptic church choirs – a stark contrast from the sparse exploration music that’s often entirely classical. Guns feel powerful, and each creature dies with bubble wrap-satisfying pops – especially once you unlock an ability that allows you to crush them from range, spilling out lethal spikes that hit everything in the vicinity.
It’s intoxicating enough – and combat sparse enough elsewhere throughout the short story, that I found myself wishing for an extra mode here. A set of combat challenges. A survival mode. Something like Returnal’s Tower of Sisyphus to give Luna Abyss a bit more heft as a package. It’s a wish that only intensified with the game’s deeply unsatisfying ending. I’m not opposed to vague storytelling on principal. In fact, I often found myself imagining a version of the game that ditched the exposition and let you piece together the mysteries of the Abyss with far less guidance. But since the storytelling here is often direct, ending on such an ambiguous and curt note felt, as Luna Abyss so often does, like a refusal or inability to bring a good thing full circle.
It all makes a game of longings, of almosts, of wanting ideas to reach their full potential. Luna Abyss was initially announced in 2022, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if Kwalee Labs faced some difficulty in development that forced them to cut back in a few areas. Even if that is the case, this is still a strikingly confident work. Fawkes might eventually escape the Abyss, but I’ll be thinking about the world Kwalee have conjured up here for a long time.
