Lumote is a cute and colourful puzzle platformer set in a persistent neon world where your aim is to change the colour of your surroundings from red to blue, and through doing this different elements will react differently towards you, and you will solve the puzzles in order to progress through the game.
The game does a good job of teaching you how to interact with the elements rather than telling you outright, and you will discover how the various parts of the world react in ways you can use to solve the puzzles, from pillars which take on your colour to be planted in giant flowers to patches of flowers which grow or retract inwards depending on which colour they represent, and introducing further elements like coloured lasers, floating platforms, squid creatures and large moving beasts you can use as a platform but have their own minds.
Pacing of the game is pretty well done and tells a story without actually using words as the cute noises and camera pans show how your takeover of the world is effecting the source of the red, and being a persistent gameworld at all times you can look around and see how elements far away are acting in different parts of the game. New elements and ways to solve the puzzles are thrown in fairly regularly and you definitely feel the challenge ramp up as you progress through learning how to use the new pieces to solve the puzzles and ultimately take over the world in your colour.
New game plus does exist in this game so there’s always an excuse to go through again, perhaps as red taking the world back, though I can’t confirm if it’s simply a colour flip or if the puzzles are different due to the nature of how red worked in the first playthrough as I did break a puzzle towards the end of my play, and whilst a fix is in a dev build I didn’t want to risk losing my progress changing to this, so I will await a main build fix, but the game is fairly robust and I just got unlucky to discover the one bug in the game that would prevent completion by dropping an element off a level in the most unfortunate spot most people wouldn’t take it and then leaving the level so it saved it permanently to spawn there.
I really enjoyed the game and though I blasted through most of the puzzles the game lasted around 5 hours for a single playthrough, and your time may differ. There are achievements to make it through without dying and also to complete new game + so if you’re an achievement hunter there’s plenty of reason to go through another run, and it’s such a fun and enjoyable experience I can see why people would wish to do so. Even if you simply buy it for one playthrough though the game is fun and well made and lasts long enough to justify the price tag so I would recommend a purchase and a play, especially if you’re into puzzles as this one is a little different to most and done in a very cute artistic manner.
Get Lumote for yourself on steam now at https://store.steampowered.com/app/791240/Lumote/