You will also find yourself looking at a series of rotating wheels or switches, hitting on-screen buttons and performing trial-and-error tasks until something happens. Certain objects collected in your inventory must be used to make it to new locations – like using lemons collected from a tree to create an electric current. Lumino City's puzzles are familiar to anyone who has played a point-and-click adventure. They would have added context during the playthrough, rather than making players assign significance retroactively. Some backstory and an interesting environmental message appear as the credits roll, and I was disappointed these moments weren’t spread across the narrative. The guitarist with no pants and the helpful diner cook with a crush on Lumi both stand out as memorable, but the plot doesn’t expand until the game is over. Story is limited, as the goal of finding your grandpa never wanes, but some of the characters express interesting personalities. The journey takes you to the top of Lumino City while meeting an assortment of characters and solving puzzles along the way. He gets kidnapped while you are making him some tea, and it becomes your task to track him down. You are Lumi, the granddaughter of the local handyman. Once you’re done gawking at the visuals, you can focus on the story and its characters.
I often moved from location to location just to see the camera pan around the structures. The movements from scene to scene also showcase an expert understanding of the importance and use of excellent cinematography. Everything looks like you could reach out and feel the ridges on the cardboard, or tug at the yarn stringing everything together, because these structure actually exist in a studio space somewhere in Camberwell, London. Part of what makes Lumino City so stunning is that all of the backgrounds (even the moving and rotating parts) were built by hand. Lumino City is meant to be more than just a beautiful series of images, but when it comes to puzzles, story, and characters, it plays things safe without offering quite the same inspiration as its visuals. Playing with my young daughter prompted exaggerated, mouth-agape “Ooohs” and “Ahhs” as we moved from scene to scene, and I absolutely related to her excitement. You could place a screenshot from the game next to an image from Laika Studios films like Coraline and ParaNorman and no one would question its place in the line-up.
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