Lumino City

Lumino City is a point-and-click adventure game set in a gorgeous handcrafted world, where you play as a girl named Lumi trying to find her missing grandad. To do so, you solve a variety of puzzles and make clever use of the items you collect to get through the city and find out what happened. The game is a standard point-and-click adventure elevated through its charming characters and its stunning handmade environments.

After your grandad mysteriously goes missing in the dark, you have to travel throughout Lumino City to find him. However, you keep encountering roadblocks in your quest to get through. Each obstacle can only be surmounted in classic point-and-click fashion: by chatting with the quirky locals, solving a variety of unique single-screen puzzles, and picking up everything that isn’t glued down. Figuring out how to use the items you find lying around requires some lateral thinking and observation, while the single-screen puzzles mostly test your pattern recognition and spatial reasoning.

If you’re ever stuck, you can always consult the “handymanual,” a charming in-game hint system presented as a reference handbook. The game doesn’t highlight interactable elements for you, but it’s generally intuitive what can be interacted with and where you can go, ensuring the game never turns into a wild goose chase for a missing item. A few puzzles have minor timing elements, but nothing extreme.

Lumino City features charming writing and a lovely soundtrack, but the most striking aspect about it by far is the art design. Every single environment has been crafted by hand, making the game feel like a stunning living diorama. And Lumino City is no ordinary town. The whole city is strange and anachronistic, yet cozy, a feeling emphasized by the peculiar townspeople you meet along the way. Throughout the game, it becomes clear that the once grand Lumino City has fallen past its prime. Yet you also get the feeling that you’re restoring a little bit of life to the place as you make the journey to find your grandad.

This description was written by Asher Stone.