Game: Lume

Platform: Mac, PC (Steam)

Publisher: State of Play

Developer: State of Play

ESRB: E

Genre: Indie point-and-click adventure

Players: 1

What's Hot: Incredibly beautiful visuals, cute story, environmental bent is sweet and subtle

What's Not: One obscure puzzle threatens to derail the short adventure

---

Review by: Danielle Riendeau

Some games are meals – they have meaty quests, peaks and valleys of action, epic storylines, and credit sequences that list hundreds of names. Others are more like snacks, with pick-up-and-play mechanics worthy of short bursts of play. Lume is more like a palette cleanser – it’s tiny, refreshing and even a little bit sweet. Developed by two-person team State of Play, it plays like a labor of love.

A classic point and click adventure that can easily be completed in one modest sitting, this is the sort of twee indie project that you’ll love or hate within moments of picking it up. The story concerns the player character – a young girl, Lume (who is made of adorably photographed and animated construction paper) and her granddad, who’s off in town investigating a power outage. Granddad is a bit of an environmentalist and an inventor, and he’s rigged his house full of sustainable technology. It’s your job to fix everything up so the power’s running at full blast again.

Naturally, you’ll do this by solving puzzles, in the classic point and click fashion. Some screens offer self-contained head-scratchers, while others require you to use items from your inventory. It’s basic stuff, though well implemented, and the whole adventure takes place within the confines of the house itself, keeping the story (and your task list) incredibly focused.

Where State of Play is breaking new ground is in visual design. The entire world of the game has been painstakingly created with paper and cardboard, intricately built to scale (almost like a dollhouse), then actually filmed. All of the in-game animations are both hand-drawn and beautifully lit and photographed, merging the DIY paper craft world with the precision of film and animation, and the interactivity of a game. The effect is breathtaking, adorable, and incredibly fresh. Even the transitions between scenes are stirring.

The music is equally striking. One mellow, happy acoustic track loops gently through the game, creating a chilled-out atmosphere for your puzzle solving. It’s so pretty and charming that you’ll want it to last just a bit longer. However, length is not Lume’s real crime. No, that would be one ridiculously obscure puzzle, the logic of which is barely signposted and almost impossible to figure out without a bit of brute-force guessing. As there’s no hint system to speak of, you’ll either be blindly guessing three sets of three digit codes, or you’ll need to call up a walkthrough to save yourself the trouble.

It’s incredibly bizarre, because every other puzzle makes perfect sense in the context of the world. You’ll fix a series of wires on a solar panel in one early, satisfying example. You’ll scour granddad’s books for hints to a musical puzzle later on. You’ll pour over a code legend to figure out another – but in all of these examples, the solution makes perfect sense. Not so with the number guessing, which I can only imagine was a strange oversight by the developers.

It’s unclear whether there will be more to Lume later (as the closing credits hint at a continuation of the story and a possible “part two”), but I’ll be first in line if there is. This is a very light, charming little game that deserves an hour or two of your time. Just be sure to have a walkthrough ready for when you get to the crazy combination lock puzzle.

Danielle Riendeau is a regular contributor to GameShark and is the cohost of Jumping the Shark , GameShark.com's official podcast and is co-founder of the gaming blog No High Scores. She's also a serious workout warrior.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .