Lumo 2

My first honest reaction to Lumo 2 was delight, then mild bewilderment, then the specific frustration of missing the same platform three times in a row while a tiny wizard floated serenely past it. That arc tells you most of what you need to know. This is a handcrafted isometric puzzle-platformer in a lineage that runs from Knight Lore and Equinox through the original 2016 Lumo, and it wears that lineage on every surface. Triple Eh? have stepped the aesthetic up from 8-bit to 16-bit this time, three distinct worlds to work through: a space station, a desert, and a spooky castle, each with its own rooms, enemies, and a cauldron back at the hub that you fill by collecting scattered paint. The structure is looser than a pure metroidvania but borrows its best trick: you start with a fixed camera and limited movement, then gradually unlock a double jump, a wand light that reveals hidden doorways, and eventually the ability to rotate the camera itself, opening paths that were invisble on your first pass. That layered reveal genuinely works. Each unlocked ability makes you want to revisit rooms you breezed past, and the collectible ecosystem, scattered rubber ducks that require you to leave a room deathless, cassette tape boomboxes that demand timed pickup runs, and per-room completionist tracking, gives completionists something to obsess over long past the credits. The variety in the puzzle rooms is the game's real heart. One moment you are guiding an autonomous hoover to a pressure switch, the next you are floating a wizard through a laser grid, the next a side-scrolling shooter drops out of nowhere in loving tribute to something from 1984. The opening mini-game, a near-pixel-perfect recreation of sections from Impossible Mission, is the kind of thing that made me audibly laugh. There are nods to Prince of Persia, Jet Set Willy, and a pile of other classics that will either land with warmth or sail silently over your head depending on your vintage. The soundtrack, produced by Dopedemand and DJ H0ffman, has the right amount of chip-inflected texture to feel like a memory without being a parody of one. I appreciated it more during the puzzle rooms than during the platforming sections, which is telling. Because the platforming is the stubborn sore point that virtually every reviewer circles back to, and I will not be the exception. The isometric camera makes judging jump arcs genuinely hard, the drop shadow hint is inconsistently accurate, and the wizard's default pace in open areas feels sticky and slow in a way that reads less as deliberate retro homage and more as unresolved friction. The post-jump float, which requires an extra button press if you want to descend at a natural speed, catches you at the worst possible moments on moving platforms. There is also no map, so you either memorise room layouts or draw your own, which some players will read as authentic old-school design and others will read as an oversight. The non-platforming rooms, the logic puzzles, the genre inserts, the block-and-button conundrums, are where Lumo 2 is most purely itself and most enjoyable. When the game trusts its own creativity it sings. When it asks you to stick a precise isometric landing for the fifth time in a row, it grates. Who is this for? Retro-literate players who found the original Lumo charming despite its rough edges will get the most mileage. Completionists who like per-room collectible checklists will find a satisfying loop. Anyone who needs responsive, modern-feeling platforming before they can settle into a game should look elsewhere, or at minimum go in with expectations calibrated. The love Triple Eh? poured into those mini-game tributes and the overall handcrafted texture is unmistakable. The imprecise jump is just as unmistakable, and it was already there in 2016. At some point affectionately intentional and simply unaddressed start to look the same from the outside. I am rooting for a patch that tightens it up, because the game underneath genuinely deserves a cleaner path to its best moments.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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