Luna Abyss

My first instinct when a debut studio name-drops Doom, Returnal, and Metroid Prime in the same breath is to brace for disappointment. Kwalee Labs earned a raised eyebrow before I loaded a single level. An hour in, that eyebrow stayed raised, and not in a flattering way. The opening stretch of Luna Abyss is genuinely underpowered: a single overheating laser rifle, corridor-to-corridor progression, and a world of grey brutalist structures that blur together. Stick with it. Because somewhere around the moment you unlock your second weapon and the shield-color system clicks into place, the game quietly transforms into something that holds attention like a vice. The core loop is a first-person take on bullet hell: Fawkes, a prisoner sentenced to thousands of days on the Red Moon Luna, is cast into a sprawling underground megastructure called the Abyss to recover forgotten technology. Enemies flood arenas with dense, glowing projectile patterns, and your job is to move, dash, double-jump, and grapple-hook through the chaos while matching weapons to shield colors. A Metroid Prime-style lock-on system handles targeting, which polarizes people, but it serves a deliberate purpose: with the aiming offloaded to a button press, your entire mental bandwidth goes to surviving the screen-filling orbs rather than keeping crosshairs on a moving target. Four weapons total, all with unlimited ammo on a heat mechanic that forces constant rotation: the automatic laser rifle for general use, a shield-breaker shotgun for blue barriers, a sniper-type for purple, and a late-game multi-shot cannon for crowd clearing. The arsenal is thin on paper. In practice, the forced switching creates a rhythm that builds into something surprisingly satisfying once it all opens up. The platforming earns its space too. Double jumps carry real momentum. The grapple hook, which works by warping Fawkes through spherical barrier devices rather than anchoring to geometry, feels odd and specific in a way that suits the world. Mech-piloting sequences, spider-form climbing, and teleporting through sealed gates keep the traversal vocabulary fresh across a campaign reviewers clock at roughly ten hours, though some sources put the more focused run closer to five to seven. The game knows when to add a new tool and when to let the existing set breathe, which is rarer than it sounds. What earns the most goodwill is the world and the writing around it. The Abyss draws comparisons to Tsutomu Nihei's architectural gothic nightmares: enormous chasms, massive pipe structures, discarded bodies under harsh lighting, and a narrative that dripfeeds its secrets patiently rather than front-loading lore. Fawkes's handler Aylin, a giant-headed snake-bodied prison AI, and the cat-with-an-axe-head creature Urien are the kinds of character designs that signal a team with genuine aesthetic conviction. The voice work carries the story further than the writing alone could, and the music shifts between choral atmospheric haze during exploration and electronic action cues in combat without ever calling attention to the transition. There are legitimate complaints to register: enemy variety stays thin for most of the run, some corridors are barely distinguishable from each other, and the late-game can get visually cluttered in ways that undercut the otherwise excellent readability the lock-on provides. The opening hour is a genuine obstacle and some players will bounce off it before the game earns their trust. This is the debut release from Bonsai Collective, now Kwalee Labs, a small British studio founded in 2019. For a first game of this scale and ambition, the fact that it holds together as a complete, paced, emotionally legible experience at all is worth noting. It does not outmuscle Returnal or match the kinetic freedom of Doom Eternal. It does something quieter: it builds a world with enough texture and dread that the combat stops feeling like an exercise and starts feeling like survival. That is harder to pull off than it looks.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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