Cute animal platformers are dead. Long live cute animal platformers.
Mascot platformers — the term, not the games themselves — used to be something you couldn't get away from circa ten or fifteen years ago. Nobody could shut up about "mascot platformers". It was mostly a reaction to studios who used to make platform games gradually shifting their focus away from stuff directed at general audiences and more towards teenagers and adults; Naughty Dog gave up on Crash Bandicoot and moved to titles like Uncharted and The Last of Us, Sucker Punch gave up on Sly Cooper and moved to Infamous and Ghost of Tsushima, and the studios behind titles like Rayman and Bubsy either died out or were put on life support. All of this is to say that platformers were starting to be seen by a lot of people as something of a dying genre, and it was hardly a secret that third-person shooters and open-world action-adventure games were replacing platformers as the default genre of AAA titles. "Mascot platformer" inevitably became a term on par with "WoW Killer" or "Halo Killer" as a dated relic that almost nothing made in the past five years would even think to market itself as.
The passage of time proved that the indie space is really one of the only places left that plays host to pure platformers. Mario is still Mario, obviously, but even Sonic has mostly started featuring platforming as an incidental inclusion alongside action-adventure combat and puzzle solving. I couldn't give a single sweet fuck about Sonic either way, but a game that's just a platformer and nothing else may as well not exist outside of small-scale, low-budget titles.
Lunistice is a platformer, and nothing more. It also isn't a splatformer, as many indie titles following in the wake of Super Meat Boy and Celeste usually are. It's a game with an identity that isn't all that strong, and is over in a single breezy sitting. But these elements together make for something that stirred an odd sense of nostalgia in me. The fact that the game has a setting that makes everything low-poly and crusty and it's enabled by default gives away the fact that this is meant to evoke The Good Old Days of platformers. In that, Lunistice succeeds. It's a perfectly competent game. This shit would have torn up the Blockbuster rentals back in 1999. It's something that I'll imagine most players will think fondly of after they finish it, rather than highly.
It's definitely a game that nobody would be able to call a mascot platformer and be correct in saying so. Hana is barely a character. Her design is messy and she has no personality to speak of. This is fine, because almost all of the focus here is being put exclusively on the act of platforming, rather than getting to know the player character. Again, this is something I feel I don't see very often, and certainly not in anything that's this polished; it seems like more and more games are fixated on the notions of having deep lore and fleshed-out characters, which isn't a bad thing, but it means that a game that lays most of what it is on the table without much ambiguity stands out.
In what I'm certain is no surprise, a game this short (likely no more than two hours if you're going for 100%) ends up being defined mostly by its gimmicks. It feels strange to call these "gimmicks" — even if it applies — because of how quickly they're over, and how there's not much else to find here besides them. The game as a whole feels more like a series of platforming microgames, and it's not until the very final level that they're brought together into a more cohesive gauntlet to be run through. I expected this to be a speed game, but it isn't really that. Lunistice is focused a lot more on developing a sense of flow, provided you aren't trying to collect all the paper cranes. If you do that, then it's a lot slower paced. The true ending is locked behind getting all of them, but the extra level you get is pretty bland and not all that fun, so it's completely fine to skip over it unless you're really hungering for extra content.
Lunistice is a charming title, and it does feel like something that could have been a late entry into the Sega Saturn's catalog. It isn't much beyond a small, fun game, and that's really all it needed to be.
Mascot platformers — the term, not the games themselves — used to be something you couldn't get away from circa ten or fifteen years ago. Nobody could shut up about "mascot platformers". It was mostly a reaction to studios who used to make platform games gradually shifting their focus away from stuff directed at general audiences and more towards teenagers and adults; Naughty Dog gave up on Crash Bandicoot and moved to titles like Uncharted and The Last of Us, Sucker Punch gave up on Sly Cooper and moved to Infamous and Ghost of Tsushima, and the studios behind titles like Rayman and Bubsy either died out or were put on life support. All of this is to say that platformers were starting to be seen by a lot of people as something of a dying genre, and it was hardly a secret that third-person shooters and open-world action-adventure games were replacing platformers as the default genre of AAA titles. "Mascot platformer" inevitably became a term on par with "WoW Killer" or "Halo Killer" as a dated relic that almost nothing made in the past five years would even think to market itself as.
The passage of time proved that the indie space is really one of the only places left that plays host to pure platformers. Mario is still Mario, obviously, but even Sonic has mostly started featuring platforming as an incidental inclusion alongside action-adventure combat and puzzle solving. I couldn't give a single sweet fuck about Sonic either way, but a game that's just a platformer and nothing else may as well not exist outside of small-scale, low-budget titles.
Lunistice is a platformer, and nothing more. It also isn't a splatformer, as many indie titles following in the wake of Super Meat Boy and Celeste usually are. It's a game with an identity that isn't all that strong, and is over in a single breezy sitting. But these elements together make for something that stirred an odd sense of nostalgia in me. The fact that the game has a setting that makes everything low-poly and crusty and it's enabled by default gives away the fact that this is meant to evoke The Good Old Days of platformers. In that, Lunistice succeeds. It's a perfectly competent game. This shit would have torn up the Blockbuster rentals back in 1999. It's something that I'll imagine most players will think fondly of after they finish it, rather than highly.
It's definitely a game that nobody would be able to call a mascot platformer and be correct in saying so. Hana is barely a character. Her design is messy and she has no personality to speak of. This is fine, because almost all of the focus here is being put exclusively on the act of platforming, rather than getting to know the player character. Again, this is something I feel I don't see very often, and certainly not in anything that's this polished; it seems like more and more games are fixated on the notions of having deep lore and fleshed-out characters, which isn't a bad thing, but it means that a game that lays most of what it is on the table without much ambiguity stands out.
In what I'm certain is no surprise, a game this short (likely no more than two hours if you're going for 100%) ends up being defined mostly by its gimmicks. It feels strange to call these "gimmicks" — even if it applies — because of how quickly they're over, and how there's not much else to find here besides them. The game as a whole feels more like a series of platforming microgames, and it's not until the very final level that they're brought together into a more cohesive gauntlet to be run through. I expected this to be a speed game, but it isn't really that. Lunistice is focused a lot more on developing a sense of flow, provided you aren't trying to collect all the paper cranes. If you do that, then it's a lot slower paced. The true ending is locked behind getting all of them, but the extra level you get is pretty bland and not all that fun, so it's completely fine to skip over it unless you're really hungering for extra content.
Lunistice is a charming title, and it does feel like something that could have been a late entry into the Sega Saturn's catalog. It isn't much beyond a small, fun game, and that's really all it needed to be.