Pretty, but...

This is a very pretty game with good music and an interesting game mechanic, which is why it BREAKS MY HEART THAT THE WRITING IS SO BAD. Its heavy-handed garbage, it feels like it was made by a clean energy nonprofit that wanted to make a Promotional Game to Raise Awareness. Its like theyre afraid that youll somehow miss that the message of a game where you go around to a bunch of planets thatd been polluted and use clean energy to fix them, is that maybe clean energy is cool. It reads exactly like a parody flier youd see on a television show.

The part of it that REALLY tears me up is how simple the fix would be: better conveyance. If you took out all the little clips where Inspirational Words fly across the screen and deleted about 99% of the helpers dialogue, instead of calling attention to the tutorial voice with very stale jokes and yet more heavy-handedness, this game wouldve had a chance to really shine.

Also, the tutorial voice was so... bad... At one point you solve a puzzle and he pops up and says "wow you did great, and so did the chroma when they built all these clean energy machines!" and, I hate to repeat myself, but... How heavy-handed can you get? Can you even lift your hands anymore under their tremendous weight?

Less than halfway through the game, the little guide ran out of things to say at the start of a level, but still felt the need to say some variation on "good luck," and I didnt even have the option to tap the text box to make it go away, so I just had to deal with half the screen being covered.

Plus it was filled with a LOT of pointless infodumps. Our main character is literally a pure white being with an orb for a head, thats as featureless as you get, and knowing that some alien race you never see is called "chroma" and that Im apparently SAM and youre GUIDE... none of this matters. Names are mostly necessary for distinction and character building, but you dont HAVE that in this game. You made us featureless. We dont ever see other people. The only overarching plot is "de-pollute these planets," and it feels like youve taken a lot of inspiration from minimization, so we dont need to know all this extraneous information and world building. Its just bogging us down with white noise.

There were a few situations I can think of where it wasnt immediately clear how a new object worked, but a small text box with a very simple explanation in those cases wouldve solved that.

When you write something with the tone of an informational pamphlet handed out at a rally, then only people who were already interested in your message will stop to consider it. You can reach a much wider audience simply by cutting it back, because then someone who didnt care might gain an interest, because they were allowed to naturally cultivate someone through your experience. Or maybe someone who didnt agree with you but loved puzzle games, and gave it a try, and because they were allowed to naturally watch things unfold, it gave them pause and made them consider things for a moment.

Its otherwise a solid enough puzzle game and the idea of cleaning up a string of planets is really cute to me, but the writing is... truly unforgivable.

Emimayu about The Path to Luma - GameClub