Luna Abyss demo playthrough (Next Fest June 2023)
1This caught my attention during Next Fest for being another attempt at an FPS with bullet-hell enemies.
The bullet-hell aspect is executed pretty well: bullets visibly stand out, and the formations seen in the demo are fairly readable so you can guess how you should move to dodge them. What surprised me more was that I felt even more inspiration from Metroid Prime than from bullet hells in this demo. Your weapons have infinite ammo (but can overheat), doors and switches activate by shooting, and the game allows you to lock on to enemies, although the camera is much lazier about tracking your target as you move (your weapon tracks it directly though).
At one point, you even gain a weapon that feels kind of like acquiring missiles in Metroid. There's no backtracking involved in this discovery in the demo, however; it's a painfully linear affair, which kind of makes me sad. With all the other Metroid Prime vibes, this feels like it could easily incorporate metroidvania elements, but I'm not sure whether there's any plans of that for the full game. The extremely dark aesthetic could impede attempts at incorporating exploration into the gameplay though.
On the subject of visuals, I had to turn down the graphics options to their lowest possible settings in order to avoid GPU contention between the game and stream encoding (you'll see evidence of this in this video; on my end, the gameplay was never affected and was always smooth). The game still looks great even on low settings, and to be honest I have trouble distinguishing the difference in higher ones, but I have to wonder if there's significant opportunity for better optimization.
Luna Abyss also has a decent assortment of accessibility settings, though I suspect that some of their effects aren't evident within the demo. (Worth noting: mouse sensitivity is also within the accessibility menu for some reason.) One thing I'd like to see in the accessibility menu that isn't there currently is an option to turn off the slowdown/pause that occurs every time you kill an enemy, which can feel kind of awkward and throw off your timing/movement if you're not expecting it.
At any rate, this game seems promising, but I fear that the demo doesn't give me enough of an idea of what to expect in terms of how much or little gameplay will evolve in the full game. There are only a few types of enemies in the demo and they're all fairly trivial to deal with, and as I said before, the demo is extremely linear. I hope the full game will have substantial variations in store, otherwise it'll have a hard time standing out in an extremely crowded genre.