Game of the Week: Lumino City

In Lumino City, you play as a young girl named Lumi. Her grandfather has gone missing and it’s up to you to figure out what happened. While the game initially sounds like standard video game fare, Lumino City’s aesthetic and gameplay certainly are not.

Lumino City’s world is made of cardboard, felt and other real world objects, giving it a delightfully tactile look, one that’s very reminiscent of PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4 titles, Tearaway and Tearaway: Unfolded. At first glance, the game’s visual aesthetic also has a lot in common with LittleBigPlanet, though gameplay wise the experience the game offers couldn’t be farther from that particular platforming title.

In fact, Lumino City’s visuals are actually based on real world models (check out the above video), giving them an additional level of charm few iOS games — or video games in general — feature.

Gameplay-wise, the player navigates through a series of pre-rendered screens picking up items, moving around beautiful architecture and solving puzzles. Some of Lumino City’s puzzles are simple but others are painfully mind bending, even early on in the experience. This means that the game’s unbalanced difficulty level has the potential to turn some players off the experience (stick with it though).

To put Lumino in context of the broader gaming industry, if you’ve played a Professor Layton game in the past, you’ll know what to expect from State of Play’s Lumino City – both titles have a lot in common.

In an interesting twist, an enormous in-game manual is also included in Lumino City, giving players straightforward hints if they get stuck on some of the game’s more difficult puzzles. Finding what specific page a particular puzzle’s solution is located on can be difficult though.

Lumino City is available on iOS ($5.79), the new Apple TV (it’s also cross-buy compatible), OS X ($14.99) and Steam ($10.99 at 50% off).