LUNA The Shadow Dust Review

A young boy falls from the sky and at the last moment lands safely on what appears to be a beach. When he gets his bearings he notices a blue flame following him, and it appears to be casting shadows, shadows of things that aren’t there. It’s when the boy finds a door, with an extinguished lantern over it that the real adventure begins in LUNA The Shadow Dust.

This is a point and click adventure game where you will be tasked with conquering rooms/floors of a large tower. Obviously your objective is clearly to get to the top of the tower, but along the way you’re going to have to conquer many puzzles, and chances are you’re going to have to attempt some of them quite a few times. The complexity of the puzzles does ramp up as you ascend the tower, and a new wrinkle gets thrown in early when you encounter some sort of cat-like creature that you will “tag-team” with to solve most of the puzzles. I have to admit that some of the puzzles drove me crazy because you really had to have your timing down, and then there were others where at first I didn’t know what to do and then I had a very satisfying “ahha” moment. 

This game really boils down to two concepts: light and shadow, and I have to say that the developers pulled it off. This is even shown between levels as you’re progressing to a new floor/room, you are slowly returning light to the tower. I love the look of the game, from the different environments you’ll have to go through to the way the characters look. There were also the cinematics that were sprinkled throughout the game that gave, in my opinion, the player a chance for a stronger emotional attachment with the story. Not all games need to have a narrator or characters voiced, it's difficult, in my opinion, to successfully pull off, but there was just enough in each area that there didn’t need to be any type of spoken or written “handholding”. I’ll also say that the music that went along with the game fit perfectly, it didn’t take away from the look of the game, and it didn’t take away from the quality of the game.

This is not going to be a game for everyone, but there’s definitely a good chance that those out there who like point and click adventure games filled with puzzles will enjoy this game. I feel like too many times we, gamers, base the greatness of a game on the time spent, and I will tell you it took me around 2 and a half hours to beat, but I really do feel that I got my money’s worth. I felt satisfied, if not a little sad with the ending, and I recommend this game to others.