Lorn's Lure

One of the most atmospheric and beautiful games I've ever played. I love finding my way, and I know I missed a ton of secrets

When I first saw the prologue, I WANTED to play this game. Beautiful, BEAUTIFUL. Love it so much, hate the last level. It's horrible. I could forgive the trial and error aspects in the 7th level, but the 8th? No, complete garbage. First time a game ever made me tweak out. Other than that, love it. Second level had a few ui bugs, but that's about it. Love how the ending ties into the dev's previous game Hatch. Absolutely love it.

I absolutely loved this game. It is transcendent, solitary, vast, melancholic, and spiritual. The challenges always felt balanced even when the path wasn’t always obvious. I am not good at this game but the generous checkpoints in explorer mode allowed me to die a hundred times to figure out my next move. If you think this game is for you then it likely is. It had me hooked from the start and I couldn’t set it down. One of the best games I’ve played in a long time. Highly recommend and I’ll follow anything Rubeki does now, looking forward to checking out Meganaut next! PS - I played this on an AYN Odin 2 Portal through Game Native and it ran at a smooth 60fps except for Chapter 5 which was a painful 15fps.

i love climbing games

Lorn's Lure is a deeply frustrating game for me, because it is very nearly excellent. But it is also deeply flawed in ways that one cannot always ignore. So lets start from the top. Visually Lorn's Lure is quite well done. The grand scale of many of the levels means that the texturing strikes an interesting balance between those crunchy early Playstation graphics that have come in vogue, while also having vistas that appear more high resolution than they truly are. Between said texture work, good color use, and some nice fog and lighting in the right places, Lorn's Lure can be a treat to look at. Animation is a different story, as many things such as opening doors are simply not animated at all. Considering the relatively small development team behind this game, such things can of course be forgiven. The music in Lorn's Lure is also excellent (barring one song, but I'll get to that). Fittingly for the atmosphere that this game is trying to convey, the soundtrack consists of almost exclusively somber or unsettling ambient tracks. Nearly each one is a pleasure to listen to and does a grand job setting the mood for its given level. Sound design is also generally solid, but somewhat on the rudimentary side. One can of course make the argument that this fits with the more early Playstation aesthetic, but it is worth noting that some sound effects can become aggravating to hear over and over again over the course of the game. The gameplay and level design are where Lorn's Lure starts to show its shortcomings. Aesthetically many of the locales are quite striking, often successfully evoking the feeling of being somewhere that was very much not made for you and is passively hostile to your presence. But make no mistake, Lorn's Lure is a very linear experience that generally doesn't encourage exploration as much as the setting might initially imply. There is a distinct path you are expected to follow, and levels generally either don't give you much in the way of optional areas to explore, or otherwise don't tend to reward you much for exploring them even if they are there. This isn't helped by level design that frequently expects just a bit more precision from the player than the mechanics and feel of movement tend to easily allow for. To be clear, the movement mechanics become more robust and fun to use as the game progresses. And when the climbing, sliding, dashing, and wall jumping all come together in concert with the level, it's an absolute pleasure to play. But equally as frequently I felt like I was fighting with the controls and the floaty feeling of the character, leading to frustration as much as anything else. Add on to that a thoroughly small and punishing safe fall distance, and you have gameplay that can feel downright unfair in places. But for as harsh as I've been, I was thoroughly captivated by much of my playthrough of Lorn's Lure when the game wasn't rubbing sandpaper on my cheek. Enough so that this game would have still been a very easy recommend for me, even if just barely. That is until the final level. Skim through the various other reviews and you'll notice most of the more detailed ones tend to mention the 8th and final level. That's for good reason. The final level of Lorn's Lure very nearly ruined the entire experience for me, and likely would have resulted in me not recommending this game if I hadn't stepped back to take a breath before writing this review. Level 8 starts by introducing one last new mechanic to the player in the form of a grappling hook and providing a short and relaxed sequence to try it out and get the hang of how it functions. This is unfortunately hampered by the physics of the grappling hook being incredibly inconsistent, sometimes rocketing the player to wherever it's hooked to, sometimes giving the player a strangely high amount of slack and dangling them five feet lower than intended before slowly pulling you up, and sometimes absolutely tanking all of the players momentum for seemingly no reason. This is frustrating, but not unlivable on its own. The issue arises when you complete that introductory sequence and get thrown headlong into the hot nonsense that is the bulk of level 8. This final chapter is, in stark contrast to basically the entire rest of the game up to this point, a timed, high speed, high precision obstacle course. You are given absolutely no time to survey your surroundings nor plan your route. You just have to run for it and think on the fly as to what exactly the developer expects you to do to get through the next section, or else die and start over from the last checkpoint. Which you will be doing over and over as you try to not only figure out where to go and how, but also try to get the very much required grappling hook to cooperate long enough for you to make it to the next checkpoint. This seismic shift in pacing, combined with inconsistent mechanics in an environment that requires high precision, level design that is messy and not easily readable at a glance, and the most frantic and grating song on the soundtrack make this level unreasonably difficult and deeply unfun to play. So now I'm sat here, recommending this game with a number of caveats. The first is that I cannot recommend this game for $15. It's got heart, and excellent atmosphere. It also has far too many problems and far too little polish to make up for those problems for me to recommend it at that price. If you can get it on sale, then I can absolutely recommend it. But not otherwise. I also must advise that if you're looking for an exploration focused experience that will really make you feel like you can go anywhere in a megastructure jungle gym, this is simply not that game. It's too linear and too restrictive in its climbing mechanics for that. If you want a short, atmospheric little experience and don't care much about the warts, then absolutely give it a try.

this game is almost perfect, atmosphere's great, tons of "woah" moments, story is good, gameplay is 50/50. climbing is the 2nd worst part of this game after the grapple unfortunately, its just not fun using the picks and the grapple either brings you straight to what you're aiming at immediately or has 30ft of slack before it ever moves you. and then there's the last half of level 8... you notice throughout the game that there's a few bugs where your character reacts weird on certain geometry but they were never really a problem outside of a few "oh well I lost a couple seconds of progress" but they really shine on this level. you have to be incredibly fast, incredibly accurate, the main character feel like its 10ft tall with how much you'll hit the orbs/lava you cant even see, the music starts to violently attack your ears on repeat after a bit(I still don't know if this was a design choice or if the music loop just started bugging but that was terrible to hear for 30 minutes straight), on top of having to manage with a janky grappler. i get its the final boss, so its supposed to be hard, but you chose a chase scene out of all things, no one likes having to do a chase scene over 100 times with 20-30 of them feeling like the games fault, they're usually not meant to last this wrong for a reason, actual bosses like dark souls or something that actually attacks sure, but my enemy is fire orbs, a bigger black orb, the map and the grappler, not as much of a "final boss" as it is a way harder version of a chase sequence you had a few chapters prior. there is an "explorer mode" but c'mon, i haven't used it for 7 chapters till this point and i dealt with that stupid ass wind in chapter 6, I'm not gonna use it on a chase sequence that just feels artificially difficult. even after beating it I feel like it would take me at least another 100 tries before beating it again, and up until that point I felt like I had become pretty decent at the game. but it just feels hard for the wrong reasons and in the wrong setting. the rest of the game is a solid 9/10, not perfect but for what you pay its well worth the experience. I'm fresh off chapter 8 so if you can tell I'm still a bit heated, but even mad I wish I could experience it all for the first time again so to me that's a pretty solid game. 8/10 overall (just please fix/change the music in that chase sequence, the first 15 minutes slapped and then It went to ♥♥♥♥)

this was something pretty special. the overall experience of Lorn's Lure was exceptional and felt so well crafted. my interest in this game was traversing the impossibly large megastructure, but the music turned out to be just as impactful. it really elevates the experience when the music is so well paired with the atmosphere. gameplay wise, this isn't a game i would typically play so i was hesitant because of the parkour mechanics. i played with controller on the Explore Mode. Explore Mode is probably the only reason i finished the game looking at what it changes, so im very pleased it was implemented. even so, the game did demand a certain degree of skill and dexterity to clear some of the parkour challenges, especially in the later chapters. but, checkpoints were plentiful so retries were quick and progressing rarely became frustrating. what i enjoyed most about this game was that there were no threats against the player. it's just you vs the megastructure. i was able to explore the mystifying zones at my own pace without having to worry about any kind of annoying interferences. highly recommend, even at full price.

Played this game from start to finish this past new year's eve, didn't realize I never reviewed it. Fantastic climbing/parkour game with unsettling, yet fascinating lore and atmosphere that makes me think about it to this day. Please more games in this universe, Rubeki!

funnest walking sim