Luna The Shadow Dust brings candlelit puzzling this summer
I'm just here to say 'chiaroscuro' again
Chiaroscuro is one of my favourite words, so what luck that upcoming point and click adventure game Luna The Shadow Dust has such a focus on light and shadows, giving me a tangential excuse to use it. Players will tinker their way through “a broken magical world that awaits illumination, solving puzzles and tracing back the memories of old,” as you can see from the trailer below.
I want his little rabbit hood.
Players will control both the boy and, well, I assume that’s the titular Shadow Dust that’s keeping him company, as they investigate their way through the tower in search of answers and lost memories. It’s also all set to music that “our musician has sold her soul to the game music devil” for. So that’s how game development works.
There’s a neat explainer in the development logs about tweaking various colours in the game so that certain puzzles could be solved by colourblind players. Hurray for accessibility, and it’s interesting to hear how a professional illustrator switches up shades to fix the problem without undermining the palette itself.
The game crowdfunded successfully a few years ago, and there’s an old demo from then kicking about if you want to take a peek. But it might be worth waiting a little bit, because there’s apparently an improved version “coming soon.”
Luna The Shadow Dust is scheduled for 2019, and if Google Translate is anything to go by, those two Chinese characters on its Steam page put its release date as this summer.