Inglorious Basterds was famously a hard movie to end. How do you end a WW2 period piece that so diverges from real history? How do you come up with a believable ending, without throwing away all the credibility you've built up? How do you untangle the knot that you yourself created, without undoing your story and your creative voice?
Well, you stop caring and shoot Hitler in the face with a tommy gun.
Faux retro games hit this problem a lot too, as I would know from experience. Whether you're doing a tribute/revival game or a period piece(No, really, we should start calling games like this 'period pieces', I'm serious. That's what they are.), there is a personal line you have to decide on for how much are you serving the past, and how much is the past serving you. How much do you owe the things you take influence from to represent them, and their item, with care and accuracy. How much do you owe your inspirations?
Lunacid, for its part, would choose to shoot Hitler in the face.
What does Lunacid appear to be?
On a superficial level, Lunacid is a King's Field-like, a first person melee based dungeon crawler that draws particularly heavy inspiration from the Shadow Tower side of From's KF-like collection. It'll tick a lot of the same boxes. It'll emulate a lot of the same features, even giving you options like the KF style compass, or tank controls. But at it's heart, at least in my opinion, it is not a King's Field-like.
Lunacid is inspired by Fromsoft, but it is not a Fromsoft game. Developer Kira is not Fromsoft, and they do not try to be.
Any one of us indie devs who have made "revivalist" game like this have tried to bring our own, unique voice to them. I may be making a Castlevania-like with Brave Earth: Prologue, but I am not, and could not make a Castlevania. My voice is too different. But I am still making a genre-piece. I'm emulating the same values of pacing, movement, and enemy placement. Hell, I originally started the game as a style study, a small(lol) side project.
Lunacid isn't like that. Are you the type of nerd who listens to a song(By the way, I don't have the time to go into this, but the soundtrack is a BOP. Kira can really do anything, can't they?) and the only thing you can do is think about what you would do with it, what a game you'd make would do it with? What the characters you create would be doing as it played? Where you basically take complete ownership of the work, [/tool]breaking it down to mold around your own creative interests?(No??? Just me?? 😰)
Lunacid does that, and with every FromSoftware game. It visually references them, it pays homage to them, and it styles itself after them, but it does not play like them. Lunacid had more in common in how it treats it's influences with I Wanna be the Guy than anything else. A collection of things someone loves, sharedrin with confidence and conviction.
What Lunacid ACTUALLY is
I started plating Lunacid with my "KF" goggles on, judging it at every step. The fact I didn't immediately fall to my death felt like a red flag, somehow. Things felt eerie, but nothing felt dangerous. If anything, I felt like an aggressor, brutally bludgeoning snails to death with a dull sword. The most dangerous creatures around me wanted nothing to do with me. Even the way the map was built felt... wrong. Not bad, but like it wasn't taking design cues from the thing I thought it was trying to be.
Then a moe demon girl(The fact it's the Dev's DnD character speaks to me deeply) shows up and basically asks you to come hang out with her friends. OH. Oh I see. Don't get me wrong, Shadow Tower has Rurufon, but Rurufon doesn't... look... like, well...
Now, I didn't take the goggles off right away. It still had that Fromsoft smell. I fretted about weapons, about missing things, about my stats(It's amazing how little this matters, while still mattering you can evenly level everything and be fine. Or level everything but Resist and be even more fine)... All the normal things you'd fret about in those types of games. I kept waiting for the unfair traps, or the terrifying and deadly enemies. They did not come. I kept waiting for brutal choices, with unclear payoffs, for terrifying areas, far beyond my current level. They also didn't come.
I kept waiting for parts of the maps I'd love -- places I'd learn to navigate and get intimately familiar with, like in King's Field 2. That also didn't come. Yet I was exploring. Combat wasn't hard -- in fact, it was pretty easy -- but I still had to cautious. It felt more like exploring a jungle. Dangerous snakes and spiders might be about. You might get yourself into trouble, might slip and fall... but it was a more controlled, lingering danger. Where Fromsoft playfully punishes the curious, Lunacid only seeks to punish the careless. A lion probably wasn't going to pounce on me. Probably(... Death is approaching).
The game by default doesn't have a compass enabled, a default I went with until near the end of the game. Exploring feels similar to climbing through an abandoned old building, or old sewer system. It's easy to get lost. Things look the same, long winding corridors that are easy to lose track of. like the abandoned old building, not everything may be interesting, but the act of digging and searching still feels exciting.
Movement in King's Field is affectionately awful, in a way that makes the combat interesting. Lunacid's movement is far more modern, and it's stat system directly effects it. Wanna run faster? Increase speed. Jump height? Increase dex. Keep going, until you're running around like the Quake Guy. Climbing and platforming isn't just about stats, either. You can and should exploit the physics system. Use a manaless spell that makes you unlimited coffins! Stack em up! Use a spell that lets you do your best Morrowind impression, launching you into orbit before you fall to your death. The game doesn't provide you with any clear, expected ways to clear obstacles like this, it merely provides you with plenty of tools to do so.
Movement like this kills the tension of King's Field style combat. To which Lunacid hardly cares. It even goes out of its way to make its weapons more fun and engaging, rather than tense. Combat is not the point. It is a tool to create texture when exploring, and something with actively fun gamefeel while grinding. If the game desires to cause you distress with combat, it does so in far more clever ways than "damage and health". Enemies that curse you, enemies that can only be damaged by magic. Blindness. Invisible enemies that can only be exposed by exploring the depth of a catacomb. Running into an enemy and hitting them only to hear an ineffectual tink noise can be terrifying in the moment, when you don't even know which way you're oriented. It fits the game's passive horror vibe, but in a way that isn't overbearing. It's a simple knowledge check that you plan around, but it means every time you explore and find something new, there MIGHT be a problem. There are no "Git Gud" skill checks, there is only intimacy with the world and what lives within it.
The game is also filled with increasingly weird ideas and gimmicks. A blood spell that makes statues scream. A ring of "corpse transform" that kills you instantly. Weird secrets you find staring at strange spots in the world. A whole plot line involves finding and watching anachronistic VHS tapes, or finding a data corrupted key that opens a texture corrupted wall. The coffin spell, mentioned earlier, is brilliant, serving both as a gag, but then as one of the more powerful spells in the game. How many problems can you solve by creating coffins??? More than you'd think!
With the game focusing so little on combat, many of my favorite areas had practically no enemies at all. The Laetus Chasm, feels like the end of the world, a giant chasm with slim, sketchy rocks to transverse across as you precariously climb in an attempt to escape the horrible giant well you were cast into. You find the bodies of those who died here, not from falling, but from cowardice, too afraid to proceed forward, but too desperate for freedom to go back. Beautiful and melancholic, a vibe which continues as you pass the chasm and into the the Great Well Surface. There you find the way up to the surface -- your escape -- gated off. The skeletons of those managed get this far cover the ground, grasping through the bars, their bodies littered with arrows. All that, only for their hope to be smashed in the end. Demi is there with you, asking why? Why do people want to leave so badly, when the outside seems even worse?
"Let's go, staying here too long makes me sad."
Your Firelink Shrine, Wing's Rest, isn't filled with forlorn, misanthropic adventures. It's filled with friends, weird little blorbos who care about you, and each other. They want to help. One is just a skeleton who drinks health potions and tells you old stories he's heard years ago. A Crow girl(Sheryl the Crow is a HILARIOUS name I could never bring myself to use and I respect Kira for using it) sells you items. A non-binary spectre is always excited to teach you alchemy. Demi is there, and she always greets you with excitement, like a good friend. It's goofy and charming and you can tell Kira loves their characters. It's infectious. It's hard not to love them as well.
This isn't something you'd get in a Fromsoft game. It's the antithesis of Fromsoft. Fromsoft has merely inspired Kira. So many areas and enemies are clear references to their work. Parts of the starting area referencing Shadow Tower, Castle le Fanu clearly referencing the Castle Layer from Shadow Tower Abyss... Titanite demons, the Moonlight Great Sword, even the core plot beats being a direct reference to Bloodborne... but the goals are different. Inspiration is not a chain.
So when you journey deep into the world, and the game is about to come to the end... while you're fighting and struggling against the last (and heck, second) boss of the game... when things are clearly coming to a climax, what does Lunacid do? Lunacid shoots Hitler in the face.
There is no escape from the great well
Castle Le Fanu
Shadow Tower Abyss's Castle Layer
All your friends showing up to help you in your moment of need. You have your Motherbrain Hyper Beam moment. Cooperation and friendship brings the best out of everyone. A moment of hope and love more fitting in Undertale than anything Fromsoft would ever make.
And it's perfect. This is the perfect ending moment to the game Kira is actually made. It ends as it should, unshackled from expectations.
These are not the life lessons you get from a FromSoftware game, but they're the ones you need
Waking from the Dream
Dreaming is an essential theme of Lunacid. The Great One, the Kos-esque moon serpent, like the Old One of Demon's Souls, corrupts the world and brings magic through it's slumbering dreams. But the nature of these dreams is different in Lunacid. Instead of being the threat of a terrifying apocalypse like it is in Demon's Souls, waking the Great One is treated liked an escape from a collapsing world. What will the future in the waking world bring? Who can say? There are other endings too! Perhaps you'd rather talk to your computer, or kill the other sources of great magic of this world, allowing you to appease the God of Cruelty and destroy a distant civilization. Perhaps you'd like Ending E, which, like Ending E in Drakengard, ends in a 6 minute musical mini-game.
But in all of these endings, the waking world isn't the waking world of Lunacid. It is the real world, complete with real life movies and photos. The game -- the "dream" -- is of course a fantasy. While not real, Lunacid wants you to take lessons from it. The love you feel here can be found on the outside too. Fragments of the dream can continue living within you. What happens to Demi, Sheryl, Etna, and Clive once the game is closed? Kira wants you to keep them alive, in your heart, as you go out into the world to continue your fight, whatever that fight might be.
I will keep them with me.
