Lunacid

Starts strong and ends pretty well, but is too long, meandering and limp for something that is too much of a throwback than a visionary project all its own. Not only that, it's a throwback to one of the stodgiest and dorkiest times in gaming, the birth of 3D polygonal exploration. There's a reason your PS1 throwbacks are mostly echoing Resident Evil or Silent Hill, not Body Harvest, LSD or King's Field. The overall gameplay loop of Lunacid is just not very compelling, even with strong elements of Metroidvania and immersive sim gameplay to give a lot of utility to a huge arsenal of weapons and spells, with quite a bit of interplay between all in both combat and puzzle solving. But the actual level design is labyrinthine in the worst ways, with huge foggy fields, no interesting landmarks, and mazes with dead ends that fold in on themselves, and as the game goes on, the loot you can find becomes far less impactful. Cranking a dank atmosphere out of basic layouts and shapes is impressive, but it's also a reminder of how the PS2 era managed to take the basic building blocks of PS1 graphic design and make them way, waaaaayyyy more believable.

So while I enjoyed the game enough, Lunacid is style over substance and nostalgia over originality. It does meld elements of old-school dungeon crawling with the new Gothic take popularised by the actual Souls games, and some 90s fantasy and anime tropes as well. I like how the atmosphere treads the line between fun and light-hearted action-fantasy with some bleak and dour existentialist dialogue and creeping dread. While it doesn't have enough kooky secrets, what secrets it does have are pretty entertaining, and certainly helps with all the walking around. I also appreciate some modern sensibilities, like just how smooth the first person controls are (although more spell-scrolling options would have been great) and perhaps the first observable instance of selectable neo-pronouns, even if it doesn't amount to much. The soundtrack is also pretty banging, albeit to its detriment on occasion (that second library theme is far too loud and fast). But there just aren't enough modern concessions; the UI is pretty clunky, some secrets are far too obtuse, some basic mechanics are also ill-explained even in the in-game manual, and the overall ludic design goes so far into capturing the experimental jank of the mid-90s it goes back into player unfriendliness. It just goes to show the seismic gap that existed between King's Field and Dark Stone, and even the most basic PS2 dungeon crawlers like Dark Cloud or Breath Of Fire: Dragon Quarter. Lunacid was aiming for homage, but it gets pretty close to parody rather than pastiche at points, and doesn't quite have enough DNA of its own to recommend as a new indie classic, even next to the very referential Signalis. Worth a play if you're more patient than most.