Have You Played… Lumino City?

I recently replayed Lumino City, for the purposes of following a joke recipe in it, and made a horrible lemon dish (it was lemony). Lumino city is a puzzle adventure where you navigate a little city that runs on all sorts of unusual machinery. And that city is a physical model, with the characters mapped onto it. It’s beautiful.

My favourite bit of the game is near the start. You find a house that is its own security camera. That is, the entire house is a camera, and it takes pictures of whoever comes through the door. It’s a tall old-timey camera, though, because of course. The bedroom is a little mezzanine. It has two rooms and would probably go for £1500 a month in London.

Someone broke into it, and to find out who you have to go to its back room, which is a dark room, and figure out the controls. Getting them right means it changes the colour filters on the windows so you can develop the photos. But then you have to figure out which chemicals to use, and the labels have fallen off into pieces! You have to jigsaw them together! If you get stuck, you can use the manual that the main character’s grandfather left her (although you have to solve a little maths puzzle to find the page you need). You’ll get instructions for the dark room controls, and a picture of what the labels looked like originally.

It’s my favourite bit because it includes everything that’s lovely about the game. It has the physical model being whimsical and surprising. It has the little interconnecting puzzles. And it has the manual, an inbuilt hint system but one with a twist. It’s the same reason I liked the hidden lemon recipe: each aspect of Lumino City has more detail than it needs to.