lunacid is not a bad game, by any stretch of the imagination. it's playable & fun enough to mess around in, if you enjoy stride-n-strike style combat & old school dungeon crawling. the music is nice too, if not unusual, and although it did set an unmistakable tone & setting, it sometimes felt unfitting, as if you turned your in-game music off to play your own. there's a level of meta-ness to lunacid that makes that kind of move feel intentional, so it ultimately didn't bother me too much ...

... but this leads me into my critique: my main problem with this game isn't that it lacks a vision or is otherwise incompetently executed; it's that i don't think its vision is good.

on my first playthrough, i feel like i could sense an underlying message being teased here. the inclusion of secret VHS tapes, repetitive dungeon design, the general PSX aesthetics, and the constant references & callbacks to fromsoftware's older titles like kings field or shadow tower all seem to be coming together to say something about nostalgia. but ... what? is the message "it's time to let it go"? why? what needs to be let go here? the genre ... ? it just feels like a strange thing to champion, when what you've made essentially amounts to a love letter to the things you're telling others to forget about.

i admit, i could be completely off the mark of authorial intent. i understand lunacid has both multiple endings & dozens of hidden secrets, and possibly indulging in all these things would better formulate the game's thesis for me ... but i'll be honest, i just don't care to know. i was not pulled in enough during the hours i spent in this world to want to go through it all again, just to get the full picture.

like ... gameplay / combat is decent enough. i like that your weapons upgrade as you use them, which is incentive to use your favorites regardless of what else you pick up ... but there's also a clear power creep in new weapons, which negates this feature entirely. as well, i don't think the level designs are fun to run through -- some have cool motifs or aesthetics, but they're structurally all just too same-y for me; they feel confusing & oppressive. does that play into ideas of nostalgia? sure. does that make your game fun to play? not really. it's a compromise i would have liked to see pushed in more creative directions, at a minimum for the sake of the player.

and speaking of "creative" ... i absolutely cannot stand how incessantly referential this game is. "sheryl the crow", the scythe-wielding demon girl, the level designs, the world building & lore, the weapons & items, that LONG as HELL cutscene basically straight-up pulled from shadow tower ... it just goes on & on & ON. i am very much a proponent of showing your inspirations & building off of them, but i am also a proponent of being thoughtful with it. when you build your world as lunacid as done -- a cheeky Remember This? Remember That? sort of affair -- its presentation is weakened by the weight of the meta. i'm not thinking about the unique circumstances of this world anymore, i'm thinking about how every other thing in this world is pulled from or obviously nodding to something outside of it ... and it just makes me think, like, why am i playing this game? why don't i just go play those games instead? lunacid has some good ideas, but they are totally eclipsed by their inspirations, and made shallower for it.

and like i said earlier -- lunacid is not incompetent. all of these choices feel deliberate. i just don't think they're compelling. it feels like there are so many more creative ways to make a game like this -- a dungeon crawler about nostalgia -- without relying so heavily on the games you want to evoke.