Lumino City is the product of cardboard cut outs, photographed from multiple angles and then pieced together to create an environment that, on an iPad’s Retina display, looks as if it was actually laid out on the table in front of you. It’s not superficial to suggest that all this plays second fiddle to just how Lumino City looks, however.Related:Rather than simply animating the city’s 3D world in standard fashion, developer State of Play took the bold (and no doubt time consuming) decision to use real, physical objects in its world. Are you challenging me?A lot of this stuff is still fairly entertaining, and the analogue trappings of each puzzle are inevitably a delight, but Lumino City's challenges do seem to sit on the surface of the game rather than emerging from the design and the landscape in an organic manner. There's always a link to the wider environment, but it doesn't necessarily convince.Popular now. Set-piece puzzles that task you with thinking about a location in its totality are simplistic, and instead you're often offered something more Laytony: a compendium of old-school brainteasers that take the form of switchboards that must be plugged in correctly, letters whose addresses require decryption, or pinball tables which need their bumpers re-arranged. 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.And 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.
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