LUNA wipes clean the settled brain dust

Starting a new videogame these days induces as much anxiety in me as a Sunday night. This isn’t because playing the game itself is a task. The problem is the learning curve with these notorious RPG-types. Big-name games these days start with a long introduction, necessary exposition, detailed tour of skill-trees and strategies, annoying pop-ups educating us on the interactable elements of the open world… Some go a step further with rules on games-inside-games, whole books that can be read,well-branched side stories, and NPCs with a complicated background.

The poor confused brain stores a multitude of control combinations and game-universe information ­— knowing full well that it would be rendered useless when she starts the next game.Having relived this difficulty by typing about it, it needed a full 15 minutes of slow breathing and mindfulness meditation to recover. It would be nice if I could do a clear cache of brain and install game tutorials directly into memory. This week, I was blessed with the gift of “LUNA The Shadow Dust” by Lantern Studio.The PC game (available on Steam) is based in an enchanted world, featuring a kid in a rabbit hat solving puzzles and a creature resembling a cat/tiny pig as his companion.

If I were a sunflower, LUNA entered my life like the first rays of the morning sun — my petals rapt with attention at the beautifully drawn art and fascinated by the complete absence of words on the screen.
There were no tutorials either! As a young bud emerging from the soil, LUNA’s puzzles perplexed me in the beginning. I was uncertain of the logic behind each level — did it follow the rules of physics? Did it involve rhythmic button clicks? Did I have to read into the symbols on the screen and remember a lot of details? But as the Earth imperceptibly moved from dawn to noon, so did my deepening understanding of the story and the fantastic puzzles.

Interaction between Rabbit hat and cat-pig worked better than my brain and mouth when I see birthday cake. The game’s music was smooth transition like surfboarding on a cloud – you found yourself ecstatic on solving a particularly arduous level, but in an emotionally intense cutscene the next moment, and then suddenly, game over in a whole of two hours. LUNA Shadow Dust is this amazingly effective junk file cleaner that my brain needed before starting the next big game. I only wish the next big game was more of LUNA.

Anusha Ganapathi  @quaffle_waffle