It’s been eleven years at this point, and I feel we are still living in the shadows of Hideo Kojima’s P.T., the playable teaser for the infamously cancelled Silent Hills. While Konami has managed to revive that franchise with a remake of the best entry, as well as The Short Message, it’s impossible not to imagine what Kojima was cooking. Many games have attempted to recapture that spirit, all with varying degrees of success. Visage and MADiSON provided the best attempts to do so. Unfortunately, though, there have been a lot of duds that just threw jump scares after jump scares, loud noises after loud noises after you. Luto, however, does something a little different. 

Story

“This is a game about death” is, literally, the first thing you see when you start the game; after that, you’ll be awakening in the desert before waking up in a house, staring at a mirror. After exploring the house for a little while, you’ll begin to realise you are stuck in it and can’t leave. Alone in the house, you have the voice of the narrator to guide you through cryptics puzzles, as well as a phone that plays a key role. 

I don’t want to spoil anything significant here because Luto tries to stay cryptic for much of its playthrough until the very end. Who is the narrator? Who is the voice on the other side of the phone? And what is with the desert?  All of this gets explained, and we get a story that is different from what I was expecting. Luto does a great job with the environmental storytelling, with notes and drawings pulling the story together with a satisfying ending. 

Gameplay 

If you played PT, then you are familiar with the endlessly looping hallway, which takes a simple house design and sends you back to the start as you enter the door. Luto takes that premise and builds the entire game around it. In it, you will be exploring a variety of looping environments that are seemingly impossible but have puzzles to solve within them, pushing this very idea to its limits.  

There are no enemies to fight, and no creatures to run and hide from. However, that doesn’t mean you are always safe.  When exploring the various locales, you will encounter ghost-like encounters. These will often block and impede your progress until you solve the many puzzles scattered around the place. 

Much of Luto will be spent exploring these small yet vast feeling environments to look for a way to escape. Looking for clues and solving puzzles that dig into the protagonist’s past. For the most part, they are mostly solid (except for one problematic one early on, which is already patched) puzzles that test your abilities. You will need to pay close attention to the clues in the environment, as well as various notes and a sketchbook, which will clue you into how to proceed if you get lost on top of expanding the story. 

IT took me roughly five-ish hours to complete Luto from start to finish. I found the vast majority of the collectables and completed the game at a relatively normal pace. However, there are still some major secrets to discover, and I’m tempted to dive back into a second playthrough to figure some of these out. Luto is at its very best when things get weird; the weirder it got, the more pulled in I was. 

Is it Scary?

What Luto does well is avoiding the trope of leaning on jump scares and loud noises. The game instead plays with your senses, your memory of the places you are exploring, and more subtly in this regard. Luto goes much further in its creative approach to horror and storytelling. They even manage to pull off the good old bed sheet ghost in a compelling way that subverts expectations.

Of course, there’s still the occasional jumpscare thrown in there. For the most part, these are nice and spread out and typically effective. I can’t spoil anything here, obviously, but Luto does get incredibly creative, and the building of tension is excellent throughout. It’s constantly tense, and I was on the edge of my seat as I approached every corner.

I wouldn’t say that Luto is a terrifying experience, but it does a phenomenal job of building up to a slow-burning tension. Not a lot happens, and the scares are more subtle, which is my preference. Overdoing it with jump scares eventually becomes more infuriating than scary, so it’s refreshing that Luto doesn’t fall into that trap. So, if you’re the sort of person who prefers jump-scare horror, you’ll be disappointed. 

Sound and Graphics 

Good sound design is where a horror game lives or dies, and thankfully, Luto shines here. Moving around the house and the many hallways, you will see and hear a whole ton of stuff. From boxes falling over to doors slamming and people moving around through the walls. It does a lot to immerse you in the world as you explore.

In terms of voice acting, there’s not a lot. You play a silent protagonist who doesn’t react to the world around him. However, there’s the demonic-sounding voice on the phone that will occasionally provide assistance (or not) as well as a narrator who shines throughout the trek into madness, occasionally chiming in with an almost Stanley Parable level of enthusiasm. I was initially sceptical of this approach, but it eventually became the highlight. 

There’s a straightforward and very recognisable use of Unreal Engine 5 here. Environments are nicely detailed, but the game is packed with the usual post-processing filters. To put it bluntly, it looks like just about any other modern horror game on the market using Unreal Engine. It’s not that it looks bad, it just looks generic. Saying that, when Luto gets creative with its visuals, it does so wonderfully with some superb effects. 

Unfortunately, but also understandably, this game doesn’t support ultrawide. No matter what you do, black bars will be visible throughout the game. However, there’s a purpose behind this choice that becomes apparent after a few hours. It’s neatly implemented, but for the fellow ultrawide users, prepare to get used to black bars on all sides for the entire playthrough. 

The Verdict

At first, I wasn’t expecting a lot from Luto. I had (wrongfully) assumed it would have been just yet another P.T. clone doing nothing more than satiating our thirst for anything vaguely resembling what Silent Hills “could have been”. Thankfully, my expectations were subverted. This is a wholly unique experience that managed to pull me intro its (very weird) world. It’s not the most terrifying or challenging of horror games, but it was a great slow burn, one I can easily recommend to horror gans out there.

Graphics: 7.0 It does look like your average bog-standard Unreal Engine 5 horror schlock, but some decent art design has managed to come up with creative ideas towards the end.	Gameplay: 7.0 A slow-burn horror walking simulator with some puzzles to solve and not much else.
Sound: 8.0 The narrator brings a creepy edge to the experience, never sounding cheesy. On the contrary, his descent into madness is a highlight.	Fun Factor: 8.5 Luto is not always terrifying but it is always engaging. It does boast some unique twists and turns.
Final Verdict: 8.0

Luto is available now on PC and PlayStation 5. 

Reviewed on PC with an RTX 4070, Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 32GB RAM. 

A copy of Luto was provided by the publisher.