Luma Island

This is more like a 50/50 thumbs down, but this game simply commits the cardinal sin of being boring as hell in my opinion. It's a bit crazy to me that Stardew is the main inspiration for so many games like this, yet they still fail to capture the true essence of what made that game so great to begin with. Anyway, here are a few bullet points of my gripes with the game so far: - I love this genre of game for its lore, characters and mystery, all of which are extremely lacking in substance in this game. Every character is a one note stereotype with the most generic dialogue lines you will ever read. You can't build relationships with the characters aside from fulfilling their endless fetch quests, so there is also no interest there for the player to learn more about them. - Story-wise, aside from one event affecting the town near the beginning of the game (which results in a sea of MORE fetch quests), there is no overarching story to be found in this game. Why are there temples scattered all over the island? Well, it's because we need to give you more items to fetch for the side quests of one specific job, duh! At least for me, finishing a temple always felt like a "ah, finally we can get out of here" moment rather than something meant to feel challenging or adventurous. Given, I have only played 17 hours of this game so far, but the fact that I still have no idea what this island and its people are about and why I should care after nearly 20 hours is definitely proof to me that very little effort went into adding any kind of substance to this game in the writing department. - I have mentioned this before, but, holy SIDE QUEST HELL! I have never played a game where over 2/3 of my play time is simply gathering ingredients for recipes in order to unlock the next recipe and find more ingredients for it. There is zero fun in doing any of that and once you level up your job, all you get is yet more fetch quests to do. It never ends! At least in Stardew, you would level up by "doing" things, such as mining, but in this game you need to gather 3 different resources to level up your gear and it honestly is just adding more steps with zero additional fun factor to it. - The infinite inventory is nice, but the inventory system is also kind of a mess of its own. Why are all the resources in the same place exactly? Things like skill points and the different kinds of essence you obtain after gathering things all share the same inventory space as the 10 different currencies used in this game and the 500 other resources you gather as you explore the island. It is such a clunky and overwhelming system, I have no idea what the devs were thinking when they came up with it. - I can 100% understand re-using and recycling content in order to pad the duration of a game to a "certain" extent, but this game is criminally recycled. Every environment is super pretty and I will gladly grant to the devs that they did an incredible job on the visuals of this game, but also each environment is an exact reskinned copy of the previous one with slight variations made to it. What kind of wood do you get on your farm? Well, "farm wood" of course. What about the forest and the mountain though? All the trees give you "forest wood" and "mountain wood". So, what's the difference do you ask? Well, they take a bit longer to cut down and yeah, that's it. They are all used to make the same exact planks and whatnot, except the color changes between them. The same thing goes for ores, fish, berries, flowers, etc in every single biome you explore. Ennemies are also extremely recycled: ghosts are in all areas of the game and spiders (and later some bats) are in every mining cave you explore. They are only there to be a bother and present a vague sense of threat because none of them give any useful resource whatsoever and killing them only serves to level up you ONE single weapon of the game, a whip given to you at the very beginning. - Sidenote, but I'm a huge fishing lover in every single game I played that has this gameplay feature (yes, even Stardew, as annoying as it can be sometimes) and this is the first time I have ever found fishing in a game to be a complete and utter chore to do. Again, another mechanic made more complicated with more steps and zero additional fun factor to it. Not to mention the base mechanic ot "stalking" the fish is just tedious to do over and over in my opinion. - Lastly, why Lumas? This game is called Luma Island, yet the addition of Lumas is frankly so unimportant? They are kind of just there doing nothing. Their designs are the most generic ever (literally google "fantasy creatures" and there you go), their AI is the most basic there is, you get to pet them once a day and yeah, that's really all there is to say about Lumas. Nothing about them is explained in the game so far and yet you're supposed to collect them all I suppose. Imagine if Pokemon was like "hey, welcome to the world of Pokemon, gotta catch them all, the end" and that's what Luma Island delivers in a nutshell. All this to say, I'm getting tired of giving money to game developers that do not understand that "cozy" does not inherently mean "boring and repetitive". Cozy is a vibe, not an excuse to produce a lackluster experience devoid of any substance and challenges. Again, I love the visuals, the music and the general vibe of the game as a whole, but as far as the content of the game goes, there is a flagrant lack of trying that was done to enrich the experience and the gameplay and what we got instead is an endless sequence of chores to complete for NPCs you have no incentive to care about.

20 Hours in Luma Island – Frustrating Mechanics and Physical Strain Overview I have played Luma Island for about 20 hours, focusing primarily on mining and exploring temples. Through this, I managed to max out my crafting materials (no spoilers on what they are). Ultimately, I decided to uninstall the game out of sheer frustration and physical discomfort. Gameplay & Features Art Style & Item Design: One of my main complaints is the asset design. The item icons lack visual consistency and strongly resemble AI-generated art. Furthermore, when crafting items, the icons are poorly downscaled, resulting in blurry and pixelated images. NPCs & Quests: The NPCs feel incredibly shallow. They offer generic dialogue, you cannot gift them items, and their quests feel like an endless, tedious loop. Completing their multi-tiered quests yields no satisfying progression; once you unlock and deliver the final tier item, the response is just a hollow "Wow, great job, let's keep going." It feels empty and unrewarding. Additionally, items crafted for these quests serve no other purpose—you can't use them or equip them as actual armor, despite literally being tasked to craft armor. Making money isn't even that difficult, which makes these quests feel pointless. Controls & Ergonomics: The control scheme is a nightmare for my hands. The game forces you to constantly hold and use the mouse to rotate the camera, which caused severe strain in the ring and pinky fingers of my right hand. Quality of Life (QoL) & Movement: The QoL features are severely lacking. While there is a fast-travel system, you cannot choose specific sub-destinations; it only teleports you to the town center. If you need to go to the blacksmith, you still have to walk all the way there. and there are no items (like coffee) to boost your speed. Worse, fast-traveling to the mountains or forest often spawns you directly onto snow patches or right next to monsters, which slows you down even further. It is incredibly annoying. Temples & Dungeons: I chose the Archaeologist profession later on, which is known to be the hardest in the game. However, the difficulty feels artificially frustrating rather than challenging. It requires pixel-perfect timing, and you are only allowed three lives across roughly ten rooms packed with traps linked to the room's mechanics. The mountain temple was particularly infuriating, making it near impossible to escape with artifacts without dying to fire traps. Clearing them just leaves you feeling underwhelmed, thinking, "Is that it?" Every temple shares the exact same opening mechanism, just with an increasing number of rooms. As for the actual main plot, it remains highly ambiguous, as the game just loops you into finding all the temple keys. Farming & Profession Mechanics: Farming is tedious and unenjoyable. The animations are slow and delayed. A massive annoyance is that if you accidentally till the soil, you cannot use a tool to revert it; instead, you are forced to replant grass over it. Since I started as a Jeweler, I needed "Luma" to craft new items. This forced me to rely on companions (helpers) who only produce 3 Luma per day when fed, making monetary progression incredibly slow. To make matters worse, the companions look like mismatched, AI-generated mystical creatures (e.g., a horned rabbit, a dragon, a unicorn, and a goldfish wearing shoes). I didn't like any of their designs. Their main utility is finding treasure chests for tokens. Side Content & Pirate Zone: The pirate zone actually felt more like the main storyline than the actual Luma plot or the talking stones scattered around. However, after exploring it for a bit, it felt mediocre and unexciting. Fishing is standard—just a basic mini-game where you track the fish, which is acceptable and not too annoying. Bubbles in the water allow you to use iron floats to dredge up treasure for the pirate quests. Graphics & Atmosphere The visual style is quite cute, featuring a blend of 2D and 3D elements. The atmosphere is well-done and doesn't feel scary or intimidating anywhere. It is perfectly fine if you just want a casual, mindless playthrough. Final Verdict 2/5 The game feels entirely mediocre and lacks any real excitement. Between the frustrating mechanics and the actual physical pain it caused my hand, I will definitely not be returning to this game.

This game is honestly very pretty. The games objectives are a bit random and for the most part very grindy. There is no carry limit (at least on the normal difficulty), there is no energy and your character does not pass out after a certain time. This is the perfect game to chat and catch up with a friend, listen to a podcast or some music and watch a stream, video or even a movie while running around and collecting resources,. It is a very chill game that you can pick up for a bit and come back to it at anytime. There is no real story, and I like that a lot. I like getting on for about an hour or so a day to run around collecting and building experience with my friend. Overtime I can see this game getting repetitive and maybe a bit boring but for now its become my favorite "let me play this while I chat or listen to this " kind of game.

Though not perfect, this game is well made and a lot of fun! The world is gorgous, the Luma are cute, and slowly getting more and more skills and upgrading your tools and farm is fun as ever. The game is a bit of a grind though, so if you're someone who doesn't like that, it might not be for you. It's basically exploring and getting materials in order to progress your skills and put more on your farm, and not that much else. The townspeople arn't that interesting to me, and there isn't that much story that I personally care about. But to me, this is the kind of game that is just really fun to play for a few hours while watching some show or documentary. Though there are some tricky bits where you might want to pay more attention, when you avoid traps indiana jones style while trying to hold on to whatever relics. For the most part it's just "run around, explore and gather" then "come back to your farm and build stuff, upgrade stuff, and pet some cute luma" and that is all this game really needs to be. What I do absolutely love is that there is no passing out at night and forcing the player back to their bed, or some hospital bed. You can just keep going and going as long as you want. Want to go on a weeks long adventure? Sure! go ahead! Your Luma and farm animals won't die if they run out of food, they just won't produce anything. (there is grass for them to eat, whatever don't feel too guilty) Your inventory space won't run out, because it's infinite! You won't run out of stamina, that is infinite as well! If you die, you will just respawn near where you died. The only punishment for death is that you might lose some items if you're unlucky, and in the temples you can lose the relics, which is annoying as the temples are quite long. But that skill is the hardest for a reason. Do I recommend this game? It depends on your expectations and what you want from a game. But if you just like exploring and leveling and slowly building up your little existence. This game can very well be for you! If you look for some complex life sim, with a deep story that truly connects you to this world and its inhabitants? It might not scratch that itch as much. As long as you have the right expectations for what this game is, you will absolutely have a blast!

Quantity over quality is basically Luma Island's approach, and they achieve that quantity by just copy-pasting the same things several times. Check this out, you've got stone, wood, resin, and other basic resources at your starting location. But then you unlock the second location (forest), and now you've also got forest stone, forest wood, forest resin, etc. Then you open the third location (mountains), and now you also got mountain stone, mountain wood, mountain resin, etc. Repeat for every unlockable location, for every possible resource: gems, ores, fish, forageables, etc. You have a bunch of professions, which require you to craft items following recipes in a strict order. But then you have several tiers for each profession, and each tier corresponds to an unlockable location. So, get this, one of the professions has you craft a bracer, a goblet, a necklace, a spear, a crown for its first tier. Guess what? Its next tier has you craft a green bracer, a green goblet, a green necklace, a green spear, a green crown, etc. You can see the pattern. The professions are whack. You take cooking, and think to yourself that you might be able to cook some food, which might buff you in some way, replenish energy, whatever. Nope. You cook a recipe, it unlocks the next recipe. The thing you just cooked costs an awful lot of money, and its only use is to be sold. Crafted items aren't used for anything else. Professions don't have any interactions between themselves: just convert raw resources into items, progress through six or so recipes per tier, and you're done. On top of that pointless treadmill progression you've got awful gamepad-first controls, very annoying at times camera, completely forgettable NPCs and "story", tons of boring walking around, unoriginal puzzles, stiff placeholder for combat, dead world, no inventory management. If somebody told me half of this game is AI generated or its positive reviews are fake, I would believe that person without question. Would not recommend, even on sale.

This type of game is my jam, and I put in 36 hours. For a cost to value ratio, I feel like I got my money's worth. That said, it REALLY started dragging and... I put in 36 hours. I don't mind a long game and can put up with some grind, but at that point it became EXCEPTIONALLY grindy. If you're good with a grind and like the "gather materials/craft thing to get more materials" loop, you could do a lot worse, but I wouldn't say it's top of its genre. I hesitantly give it a recommend.

I only played occasionally and I absolutely love the puzzles in the caves and the game aesthetic/design. So cute.

I play this on my own and with my husband, it is super cute and really fun. It's not stressful like a lot of similar games and I really appreciate that.

игра довольно гриндерская (что может многих раздражать), но тем не менее очаровательная, очень расслабляющая и ненапряжная. как любительница находить всякие секреты в уютных играх я реально кайфанула. есть много фишек: много контента, нет стамины и бесконечный инвентарь - балдей не хочу, короче

探索のギミックが楽しいが、職業を進める上でルマエネルギーを貯めるまでの時間がかかりすぎる。 基本的に同じ作業の繰り返しで飽きやすい。