Its hot-spots are poorly placed, largely invisible, and annoying to navigate, and the design is not quite as skilled at leading your eye to the stuff that matters as it should be. Although this is nominally a point-and-click, it's not actually a very good one. Lumino City's a fabulous location to potter around, but beyond the clever use of bric-a-brac and artful depth-of-field implementation lies a game that struggles to cohere. If you want a frightening insight into how expensive bespoke design can be, it's taken State of Play three years to make a game that lasts just over three hours.Īnd yet, if it's not quite half-built, it all feels a little incomplete. It all adds up to an astonishing place to explore: a modern Trumpton or Camberwick Green. Like every good indie video game, Lumino City has a lighthouse, but this lighthouse has a lens of thick, deeply scored glass. Elsewhere, there's a perfect Airstream diner, the size, most likely, of a milk bottle, resting near a clutter of copper piping. There's a wonderful eye for dreamlike detail: way up high on the arching back of a giant flywheel you'll find a ship that has come to rest, far from the ocean, while its captain slumbers in a sagging hammock.

The metropolis you pick a path through has real variety, from sheer pasteboard cliffs where little cage-fronted shanties move in and out with the shifting of unseen cogwork, to a security hut that's built from an old camera. Lumino City is sprawling and intricate, and every finial and fusebox speaks of a deep sense of craft. Doors were drawn on walls in felt pen, and camera movements had a sweet and homely shakiness to them. Lume was a clever piece of work, but it had the look of an afternoon's fun that got seriously out of hand. It's a massive expansion in terms of scope and scale. The narrative follows a girl named Lumi who's looking for her missing grandfather, but the real story is one of constant discovery and delight: each screen in this point-and-click puzzle adventure taking you somewhere ingenious and new. Like Lume before it, State of Play's latest takes place against a backdrop of physical models, pieced together from cardboard and wiring and doll's furniture and scraps of felt. Lumino City has an architect - and it's the architecture that makes the most lasting impression here. Games get built, even if the building blocks themselves are little more than light, and the scaffolds are scaffolds of code. Somebody had to blueprint the Citadel, the Cradle, the Skycrown battlements where I've bludgeoned so many demons and helped raise so many catapults.

Architect: not a credit you expect to see in a game's post-victory crawl.

Lumino city lens