Laraan

I want to love everything about what Laraan is trying to do. A minimalist low-poly science fiction world, cinematic fixed camera cuts borrowed from vintage action-adventures, a full orchestral score composed by Victor Riera that honestly deserves a better game wrapped around it. The premise drops you into the boots of Zoah, a figure in white sent by a divine voice to collect eight golden stones from a hostile, emptied-out landscape. That setup has atmosphere. It has the bones of something genuinely strange and interesting. Then you start walking, and the bones are mostly all you get. The moment-to-moment experience shifts between on-foot traversal across sparse environments, platforming sections where you jump between floating rocks, speeder bike segments, a handful of melee encounters, and at least one skydiving sequence. On paper that sounds like decent variety for a short game. In practice, the camera system, which uses dramatic cinematic zooms and cuts in the style of old PlayStation-era adventure games, works against the platforming hard. Lining up a jump correctly becomes a guessing game because the angle changes mid-sequence, and the controls themselves can be unresponsive enough that the spacebar sometimes needs multiple presses before a single command registers. The speeder bike sections, which could have been a highlight, suffer from collision detection that treats nearby obstacles as instant walls even when you look to have cleared them. Checkpoint squares do exist to soften the frustration, but they are doing heavy lifting. What genuinely works is the visual identity. The limited colour palette and low polygon geometry create a world that reads as deliberately sparse rather than unfinished, at least in isolated screenshots. The sci-fi-inflected soundtrack sits comfortably above the rest of the package, and there are moments where the fixed-camera framing produces a shot that actually looks cinematic in the way the developer intended. The ambition is readable. The execution is where things thin out. Beyond the intro text, story context essentially vanishes, and with only one enemy reported by multiple players across the entire run, the desolation stops feeling atmospheric and starts feeling like an absence of content. The whole experience clocks in at around one hour, and even at that length, the emptiness of the world is more noticeable than its mood. This one is for the very patient collector or the player who finds beauty in unpolished experiments and wants the soundtrack to carry them. If you need responsive controls, clear objectives, or a world that fills its silence with intention, Laraan will test you more than it rewards you. Controller play is genuinely recommended over keyboard if you do go in. I hold out a small, warm hope that somewhere in its spare geometry and that score by Riera, someone else finds the quiet meditation the developer was reaching for. I just cannot honestly tell you I found it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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