Lume for Android

It was only 2 bucks, so I decided to try it. It’s a simple game with a small window but you don’t need much. The premise was to turn on the lights after you read Grandpa’s note. It’s an introduction to Lumina City which Grandpa wanted to tell his granddaughter the story of his adventures in town. Back to the puzzles - it’s kinda the same format at Machinarium only simpler, so it makes it a nice one to try. Takes some skill to think things through. I did have to go back and forth to figure out what I needed to do to open a door or get an object. Commands are basically point and click except for quitting which uses your menu/dock or cmd Q on keyboard. The music was cute and after a while I was humming along with the tune. I liked it enough to go ahead a pay for the LuminoCity which continues the Lume story.

The game is short. Too short for the price. In the same breath, the graphics are beautiful. The story line is interesting, and you want to be immersed in this world. The puzzles are challenging—you’ll need your thinking cap—and rewarding. This is why I was so aggravated when I finished this game a couple of years ago; it was short, and I felt short changed. But I've always felt the game was made with love and care, and, man, did I want more of this world! Years later, I get wind that Lumino City is in development, and checked things out. After watching some “making of” videos, I am highly impressed with State of Play. Lume synthesizes stop motion animation movies with video games. The time and detail it takes to create this amazing world goes well beyond what I had expected—stop motion animation is some of the most time consuming and trickiest kinds of filmaking there is. I am blown away by the process of making these games. Now that Lumino City has come out, which demonstrates a fuller, more dynamic dip into this amazing world, I feel more fullfilled by the original Lume than before. In retrospect, after initially being dissappointed years ago, but have since played the game several times just for fun, I feel I invested in something worthwhile. This is proven by the scope of their follow-up game. Lume is a valiant first effort, and worth buying if not just to support State of Play so that they may have some capital to bring us more content in the future.

Wow! Beautiful game! What great puzzles. Just challenging enough to make this really fun. I am having a really great tim- Wait. It’s over? Are you serious? That took like 20 minutes! This is so f-ed. Realistically, this should have been 3 times as long. If this were a demo for the full game, I’d have already bought it, but I’m so annoyed that I paid for something this incredibly short. I don’t care about spending the money, but if you’re going to charge me, you need to give me something that has more value than most of the free apps I use. I’m also guessing that the promise to extend the game was a false one considering it came out in 2012 and I’m writing this in 2015. Not cool. Reallh feels like a cash grab.

Lume would be an acceptable demo of a cheesey ten dollar point and click game if you could play it full screen. If it were a full game, it wouldn’t appeal to me because the puzzles rely too much on environmental clues rather than strategy or intellect. I don’t miss the $2 it cost me (I’d be upset if ir cost the full $5), but the time I spent playing, however brief, wasn’t really worth it. I do like the concept that the game is actually made of something, but since drawing a game on paper is likely much easier than rendering a 2.5D landscape digitally, more time could have been spent on this.

The first time I loaded this, I was put off by the fact that the screen went almost completly black, hiding the Dock and the Menu, and the game itself runs from a tiny box in the middle of the screen. I understand they didn’t design it for full Retina screens, but if that’s the case, it would’ve made more sense if the game loaded in a window, instead of completely filling the screen. Without the menu bar or dock, I had to use Command-Q, because I couldn’t find a quit option either. I assumed this was just an issue with my 5K Retina screen, but I have two monitors, and my second monitor is only 1920 x 1200, so I managed to drag that desktop to my other monitor, and it was still a small box there too… but at least I was able to make it run inside a window on that monitor. Perhaps if it started at that resolution, it would’ve been bigger, but I can’t make it do that.