Lorn's Lure

A wonderful 3D platformer that will entice you with puzzling movement and "Was I supposed to do that" plastered over a 3rd of its walls. The lore is invidious, its depressive swings will comfort you as you fall and it swoons you over with a vague goal of understanding. You won't need a walkthrough or tutorial to complete this game, the hints provided (optionally enabled/disabled) are helpful enough. Side-note; for the lore, it appears that Rubeki's "Hatch" serves as a sort of 'chronological sequel' to Lorn's Lure. There's a lot less content and mechanics, though. I'd rather read a book to scratch that itch.

One of those days I wish I could give a more precise rating on steam rather than YES NO I did enjoy this game, but sadly I think its held back by at least a couple letter grades due to JANK alone. While this game does include jump buffering like any good platformer would, it fails to buffer anything else that could potentially use it. I would bet you a solid 50% of my deaths in this game were due to falling and hitting the floor on the same frame as the fall kill indicator appearing, making a ton of what looked like safe jumps unsurvivable. I feel like having the fall indicator appear for just a 10th of a second BEFORE any of its effects kicked in would shoot this game up from like a 6 to an 8 at least. I also thought the [spoiler]grapple[/spoiler] in the final level could use a buffer. Often, it'd be out of range, I'd throw myself at a wall, click to [spoiler]grapple[/spoiler]... Oops! I clicked it a single frame before I was within the appropriate range and now im plummeting to my death !! (Also, to add to the [spoiler]grapple[/spoiler] issues... SUBTLE SPOILER: [spoiler]The environment before the difficult section is bright and makes it very hard to see your UI, making the intro to the grapple a bit annoying.[/spoiler]) This game is a little misleading with it's "climb almost anything" marketing, there is a lot more unclimbable stuff than there is climbable. Most of the time the only thing that's climbable is the exact thing you need to get on to progress. Some chapters have more than others tho. Occasionally areas will require you to hump an 89 degree slope in order to progress, where visually it just looks like an unclimbable wall. Got stuck running in circles a couple times because of this. Visually the game is really cool, thought it felt a little same-y at times though. I liked chapter 4 visually a lot. The story I found not all too interesting, but it is not obtrusive at all which is really great. I did enjoy occasionally hearing the thoughts of our robot guy. But just know that if you don't give a hoot about Lorn's Lore this game won't force you to sit through anything. A lot of the other reviews complain about the difficulty spike in the last chapter, and I have to agree that the spike is a bit too crazy. Of course, a precision platformer is going to be frustrating a times, but due to a lot of the jank I outlined earlier, its significantly more frustrating than I think it ought to be. Previously, every issue in the game was remedied by slow moving gameplay and frequent check points. Was it jank? Sure, but the game was forgiving enough that holding onto patience wasn't hard. The last level rips those comforts out of your hands! Checkpoints? ♥♥♥♥ em. They are rare in this section. I really enjoy the speedrunning mechanics and I was hopping around quickly the entire game, so I'm not against a "chase" sequence one bit, but by god is it precise, there is ZERO time for dilly-dallying here ! For a couple of the checkpoints, you have to start running while the black transition is still covering the screen if you expect to make it through the obstacles in time. I like challenging, hard games, I like to overcome frustration in a game. But the final level dipped a little too deep into the bad kind of frustration. I wasn't satisfied by overcoming it, I was just glad it was over. It really soured the ending for me and my opinion on the game as a whole. Still giving it a RECOMMEND because I did enjoy jumping around. Despite the jank, the rest of the game is forgiving enough with its checkpoints and only rarely asks you to be extremely precise, it never dipped into that bad kind of frustration that just isn't fun. I give it uuuuuuuh 6.5 / 10 ??????????? yeah