Every now and then, a small indie game from a debut developer comes along and just blows us away. Lunarium comes from the Shanghai-based studio of the same name, and comes out swinging with an epic, heartfelt, and challenging ARPG that caught me by surprise in the best of ways. I didn’t expect much coming into this game, yet I enjoyed just about every minute of it. That said, it’s not perfect. Let’s get into it.

Set in the land of Fireleaves, a dark corruption known as the Nihilus destroys and corrupts everything it touches. You play as Ave, a knight with the ambition to join the Starfarers. One day, on a mission that has gone wrong, she encounters Lune, a Starfarer herself, on a quest to save the world. 

Lunarium impresses with its distant shots.

What follows is a somewhat simple but surprisingly engaging story, as Ave and Lune battle through a fallen kingdom to uncover its past and save its future. Along the way, you will encounter some interesting characters and a world that has a surprising amount of depth, with some great reveals and a story with plenty of heart. Not afraid to play with your emotions, though some translation issues and placeholders have made it difficult at times. 

Lunarium plays like your standard isometric ARPG. You’ve got your standard array of light and charged heavy attacks, dodging, and parrying. It’s fast, fluid and responsive, which is good, as the enemies can also hit hard. You will be battling a surprisingly vast number of enemies throughout the adventure.

You will be taking control of Ave, whilst Lune plays a support role using more magical, ranged-based attacks. Somewhat similar to Diana’s role in Pragmata, who weakens enemies and provides support. Ave can dodge or parry most attacks in the game, letting her build up resonance with Lune and unleash some more powerful attack that drains the enemies’ stagger meter. Fully filling the stagger bar will completely stun the enemies and allow you to unleash even more damage with charge attacks or combos. Combining both Ave and Lune’s attacks can unleash some incredibly strong combos. 

There’s also a very soft Soulslite structure, with limited healing items that can only be regenerated by sitting at benches throughout the world, or when the game puts a generous boss checkpoint. At the same time, it’s not overly punishing. You don’t lose any of your currency when you die, and getting back to where you were doesn’t take too long, especially with those checkpoints next to just about every boss fight in the game. 

Boss fights, of which there are plenty, are a highlight.

Boss fights are, for the most part, incredibly well done, with some creativity and challenging mechanics that will test your skills on a regular basis. Throughout the roughly twelve hour experience, you will end up facing a wide variety of bosses that rarely feel identical. It’s also fair: every death feels like it was my fault, and it never felt overwhelming at all. Whilst some bosses can be challenging, I very rarely found myself dying more than a handful of times to any of them, and most of those deaths come from sloppy gameplay and getting too greedy. 

Whilst there’s no traditional levelling system here, Ave can boost her skills and abilities with various unlocks throughout the game, as well as the cape and embroidery system. Capes can be crafted at the loom with the resources you find out in the world and provide Ave with special abilities. Then you can further enhance these capes with tons of different embroideries that can further enhance Ave’s and Lune’s abilities. There’s plenty of build potential here, allowing you to build into different playstyles. Personally, I went into gaining resonance as fast as possible to stun enemies more often. 

The world of Lunarium starts off rather linear, with a few pathways to make it feel more fleshed out, but going into the second half things really ramp up and it can actually be easy to get lost. The maps overlay each other, with a few surprises in the later areas as well. Thankfully, the in-game map is detailed and lets you place custom markers, making backtracking to find those pesky locked doors or previously inaccessible upgrades more manageable. Though it’s also not a massive game in general. My playthrough took around twelve hours, with a lot of the side content done as well.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen quite a lot of this in my twelve hour gameplay. Hopefully it’s patched out by now.

Whilst the build I was playing for the review period worked for the most part, the developers are clearly still working to get things ready for launch. It runs well and didn’t crash at all, but I did notice a few oddities and text that hasn’t been fully translated yet, with placeholder text that either doesn’t translate or is poorly translated. This made it incredibly hard to understand much of the story or what certain menu choices actually meant. On occasion, I did switch the language back to Chinese and use my phone’s autotranslate to even get a grasp on certain moments.

On top of this, multiple bugs had moving platforms not rendering, limiting visibility, or more serious bugs that briefly soft-locked me until a patch came out. Especially in the later sections of the game where I needed to do some fairly exhaustive backtracking and certain sequences just wouldn’t trigger. To give the developers credit, I was warned that the pre-release build would have a lot of issues, but the vast majority seemed to have been fixed beforehand with patches that have improved the game and seemingly added a few more features in there as well.

The first time you boot up Lunarium, you’ll notice the hand-drawn world looks simple but at the same time absolutely gorgeous. You will be exploring and fighting through ancient forests, crumbling castles and lost islands, each with their own distinctive colour palettes, enemies and visual style, with tons of areas and secrets to uncover in them. Animations are smooth and expressive, with everything being incredibly clear on screen. 

Ave’s and Lune’s adventure might be one of the biggest surprises for me.

As for the sound, Lunarium doesn’t opt to use voiced characters and instead lets the world and music speak for them. Being surprisingly reminiscent of one of my all-time favourite games, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It can be serene and peaceful as you wander through these desolate areas, and then it throws you into an action-packed boss fight with music to fit the tone. Although again, the sound design isn’t perfect, with music cutting out randomly and sound effects going missing.

Outside of some translation issues and bugs with the pre-release version, Lunarium has been an absolute blast to play from beginning to end. One of this year’s most surprising releases that has come out of nowhere, with a solid story that has plenty of heart and an engaging combat system that isn’t overly challenging. If you are on the lookout for a new ARPG, then I can absolutely recommend Lunarium. 

Lunarium is available now on PC.
Reviewed on PC.
A copy of Lunarium was provided by the publisher.