Lumenfall

What is Lumenfall

Lumenfall is a single world seventy-two thousand pixels wide, cut into thirty realms you cross on foot without one loading screen. You start in a clearing with a hundred and forty health, sixteen damage and nothing else, and the road to the Citadel is a straight line that only runs east. Between each realm and the next stands a seal — an obelisk that closes the way and does not yield to blows.

There are twenty-nine seals and each hides between one and three puzzles: the first three ask for one, the fourth through the twelfth ask for two, and from the thirteenth onward they ask for three. A full journey solves seventy-two puzzles from five different families, all built to be solved with your head rather than your reflexes. What waits on the other side is always a new realm, with its own weather, its own monsters and its own secrets.

How to play

1. Walk with WASD or the arrow keys, strike with J or the left mouse button, and use E for everything close at hand — leaning on an obelisk to open its puzzle, listening to an echo, entering a shelter. Space is a quick dash that leaves you invulnerable for four tenths of a second, with eight and a half tenths between dashes. On a phone there is a stick for the left thumb and five buttons on the right: strike, dash, bolt, nova and E.
2. Seals open to puzzles of five kinds. The echo lights runes in order and asks you to repeat it, from four runes at the first seal to eight at the last. The rings turn through six positions each and must all line up with the arrow. The pipes turn tile by tile until the light reaches the right edge from the left. The constellation shows the order of the stars once and asks for it back. The cipher has dials that move three at a time, and you must find the sequence of taps that puts every one of them on the right symbol.
3. Every seal you open grants experience and moves your return point: dying sends you back to the last seal you opened, not to the beginning. Eight of the seals give more than passage — the first gives the bolt (F, sixteen energy), the fifth thirty more energy, the ninth the nova (R, forty-five energy and a five-second wait), the thirteenth five more damage, the seventeenth forty more health, the twenty-first forty more energy, the twenty-fifth six more damage and the twenty-ninth fifty more health.
4. Scattered through the realms are ninety Star-Forge shards, three per realm, and taking all three from one realm heals thirty-five health. There are twelve memory echoes in chosen realms, eighteen places to enter — twelve shelters and six shipwrecks —, one elite monster per realm from the second onward, and cracked rocks that break in three hits and drop a shard, health or energy. At the end, in the Citadel, waits Malgrath, seven hundred health and no way out once he is awake.

Strategies that work

• The score rewards those who do not get lost: fifteen points per monster killed, a hundred and twenty per level, forty per shard, twenty-five per echo, and on top of that twelve thousand points that drain at two and a half a second. After eighty minutes that part is zero. Exploring pays, dawdling does not — take the shards of the realm you are in rather than walking back three realms for one.
• Three shards from the same realm are worth more than three loose ones: the third grants thirty-five bonus health and thirty experience. Since they always sit at three different heights of the realm — high, middle and low — the most efficient crossing is a wide zigzag rather than a straight line.
• Energy only starts climbing six tenths of a second after your last bolt, at twelve a second. Which means firing without pause is the worst way to use the bolt: two shots and a melee swing pay better than four shots and an empty bar in front of an elite.
• The space dash is for crossing more than for fleeing. Its four tenths of a second of invulnerability cover exactly one geyser in the ember realms or one mine in the swamps — it costs less health than going around, and it is always faster.
• Do not wake Malgrath before you are ready. The moment you come near the Citadel he stirs and the game stops letting you back out; if you still have shards to gather, echoes to hear or half a health bar, get them before you take those last steps east.

A little history

Worlds you cross without loading are an old stubbornness in games. When Exile and Turrican tried it in the late eighties, the problem was not the design: it was memory, which could not hold two scenes at once. The solution that stuck was the corridor with a door — the player walks through, and the machine uses the walk to throw away what is behind and fetch what is ahead. Thirty years later, with memory to spare, plenty of games still do it out of habit, and the door nobody needs has turned into a convention. Lumenfall has no doors. It has thirty realms side by side on one plane and an obelisk between each pair, and the obelisk hides no loading at all: it is only a puzzle. The difference shows when you look back and see, far off, the realm you came from — whole, still there, with nothing between the two but the ground you walked.

Frequently asked questions