Platform: PC
Genre: Action RPG, Soulslike, Artsy

You don’t hear the term “atmospheric isometric Soulslike action RPG” often. Most of the time it’s a third-person Soulslike set in some dank and gritty dark fantasy setting. Too few take place in high fantasy and bright watercolour-esque ephemeral planes of existence.

Enter Lunarium, a new title from the China-based Team Lunarium that fills in that not-quite-sought-after niche. But honestly, I’m glad it exists because all you need to stand out in this saturated genre is a literal fresh coat of paint.

Star-Crossed Starfarers

You play as a female knight named Ave, who ends up crossing paths with a starfarer named Lune as they both set out to save their world from collapsing under the forces of darkness.

You progress through the multitude of brightly-coloured and line-less backdrops like abandoned knight forts, tranquil forests, and even an “underwater” maze spurned out of a lost fishing village, solving puzzles and dealing with enemies along the way. These all may sound pretty generic, but the presentation and music that accompanies it just stands out and lets your eyes and ears do the feasting. The team really put their all in the game’s aesthetic, and it does not disappoint in the slightest.

While you control Ave in a isometric top-down action RPG setting, you have Lune who hovers and teleports close to your location, using her light powered arrows to deal with threats. Ave takes them on up-close with light and charged heavy sword strikes. She can even pull out a giant magic two-handed sword for a bigger slash, or even repel projectiles back to foes.

Furthermore, she can change fighting styles and get additional buffs with cloaks and embroideries. See, Lune is a talented seamstress who can etch special embroideries onto Ave’s cloak. These help in your survival and combat, like letting you regenerate health after casting one of Lune’s resonant skills, or getting a damage boost after a perfect parry. Get used to dodging and parrying enemy attacks a lot; Team Lunarium are clearly Dark Souls fans as the majority of combat and boss battles can take you down in a few hits if your defenses aren’t up to snuff.

Save for a few endgame boss fights, you can eventually tank through and even avoid most of them once you spent time gathering resources at Lune’s shrine headquarters (where you get all your equipment and upgrades sorted). In fact, the game gets generous with the in-game currency so you can mostly upgrade Ave’s kit to the fullest. I’m not saying the game gets really easy, far from it. But the game’s levels and enemy placements get trivialized after a few hours once you realize that Ave can’t die if she keeps blocking enemy attacks.

The current review build I have also does have a good number of placeholder text in dialogues and lore prompts that clearly isn’t meant to be there. While I get the gist of the game’s plot and the girls’ friendship growing over time, the placeholders do reek of the whole story feeling incomplete. Plus, going through certain menus when upgrading your equipment can get cumbersome and slow.

Resonance of Fate

Lunarium is a beautiful & gorgeous indie-level action role-playing game with a lovely amount of challenge and a few unfinished text bits and user interface options to sort out. While its plot feels unfinished, at least the combat and gameplay aspects aren’t as compromised as you’ll get a good solid 20 hours out of your atmospheric Soulslike experience.

Final Score: 70/100

Review copy provided by publisher.