A Charming Isometric Homage with a Modern Polish
Isometric games, as a concept, can be tracked all the way back to the 1970s, emerging as a new way of presenting graphic content that cleverly created the illusion of a 3D world.
This perspective was a technical marvel at the time and platformers used this viewpoint particularly well, with iconic arcade games like Q-BERT. And then RPGs truly got in on the act with seminal, genre-defining titles like Knight Lore on the ZX Spectrum back in 1984.
The first Lumo game, which was released almost 10 years ago, was a heartfelt love letter to these games of old. It took us on a nostalgic journey that served up challenging platforming and clever puzzle-solving, all presented through hundreds of little, self-contained rooms.
Now, this retro-inspired series is back for a second game and Lumo 2 promises new gameplay mechanics to freshen up that classic formula.
The Miniature Wizard’s Quest
The game starts in a familiar bedroom, where a man is working on his PC. After a few clicks of a button, it looks like he tumbles directly into the game world itself, becoming a diminutive wizard. That’s the simple setup for the story, but what it really does is provide a charming excuse to play through a series of retro-inspired puzzle and platforming rooms.
You, as this wizard, are introduced to a central hub room which holds three large cauldrons and some corresponding portal-like doorways into other realms. One of these portals leads to a spaceship orbiting a distant planet; another sends you to a sort of classic role-playing castle; and the third transports you to a scorching hot desert. In a nice touch, you can pick any of these three distinct worlds to start the game in any order you please.
Paint and Puzzles
Your primary task in Lumo 2 is to go into these three areas, get through all the rooms they contain, and collect enough paint icons to fill the three corresponding cauldrons back in the hub world. Some of the paint icons are easy to find, sitting in plain sight at the end of a platforming challenge. Other ones, however, are far more complicated and will require you to solve a series of intricate puzzles to reveal them.
What makes Lumo 2 unique is that each room you face often mixes these elements. You’ll be platforming while puzzle-solving (like the famous Pipe Mania pipe-laying puzzle), all while simultaneously avoiding enemies like bats in the castle or rogue robots on the spaceship. Furthermore, the game will often completely change its style, shifting into a different format and perspective entirely, which keeps the experience feeling fresh.
The Curse of the Camera
In regard to the core platforming mechanics, if you haven’t played an isometric game like this before, then you could be in for a rude surprise. The fixed perspective, by its very nature, makes judging depth and distance notoriously difficult. It’s sometimes incredibly hard to find the right angle or to mentally line up the platform you are on with the one you need to get to. The jumping mechanic itself feels a bit floaty at times, lacking the tight, precise control you might be used to in modern 2D or 3D platformers. It definitely takes a while to get used to this specific feel, and you will have to re-train your brain to account for the perspective.
Honestly, whether you find this specific, retro-style challenge charming or just plain annoying is where the enjoyment of Lumo 2 truly hinges. You will, of course – this being an old-school homage – die a lot. But there is no real stress, as the checkpointing is pretty generous, and you have multiple lives to burn through.
The exploration is refreshingly non-linear. You might find yourself going backwards and sideways around the interconnected levels, looking for new connections and puzzle solutions that open up different routes and doors in places you visited an hour ago. These two elements – the puzzle-solving and the exploration – work extremely well together. Because of this structure, each room feels fresh, often introducing new ideas and different game designs.
The worlds are also packed with lots of secrets to find, including rubber duck collectibles. These are placed in far trickier, more devious locations than they look, often requiring you to master a particularly tough platforming sequence to get them.
Presentation and Style
The game will genuinely surprise you now and again when it completely changes its core perspective and gameplay style. In one level set on the spaceship, it suddenly abandons the isometric view and turns into a 2D side-scrolling space shooter, where you have to disable an enemy ship and avoid its gunfire. Then, there is a whole section that is a brilliant take on the classic 3D rail-shooter Space Harrier, complete with a different twist that I won’t spoil here.
There are so many homages and clever references to games gone by in Lumo 2 – from Ant Attack to Marble Madness – which for a veteran gamer like me, felt like a nice, warm memory of a bygone era. The youngsters among you might not get these specific 1980s references, but the gameplay segments themselves are fun enough to be enjoyed on their own merits, nonetheless.
For a game that is so openly retro-inspired, the visuals look remarkably shiny and new. The colour palette is spot on, and the rooms themselves have a brilliant, clean gloss to them that really heightens the fantasy feel. I really liked the switching of visual styles on a dime, and it’s impressive how many different elements are packed into its design. As I’ve mentioned, the isometric viewpoint is an absolute nightmare at times for the precision platforming sections, but that’s more a consequence of the creative choice to emulate that era, rather than a flaw in the visual design itself.
The sound is fun and minimal, with various looping soundtracks that are thematically appropriate for each of the three different worlds, providing a nice audio backdrop to the puzzle-solving.
A Challenging Retro Treat
Lumo 2 is all about the rooms themselves and the challenge of how to solve them. Sometimes these rooms are connected, forming a larger, non-linear map, and sometimes they are standalone challenges. Each one plays around with different mechanics, from platforming to shooting to pure puzzle-solving. It’s a heady mixture of different styles and loving references to old-school gaming.
You’ll have fun with Lumo 2, even if the isometric visuals do prove to be a persistent nightmare during the more demanding platforming sections. See through that and this is a well-crafted, retro-themed surprise.
Important Links
Lumo 2 – 100 Rooms, Three Mini-Games, and Playable in WELSH – https://www.thexboxhub.com/lumo-2-100-rooms-three-mini-games-and-playable-in-welsh/
Buy Lumo 2 from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/lumo-2/9NP986C45P27/0010
