{"id":11621,"date":"2026-08-26T11:03:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T01:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=11621"},"modified":"2026-10-23T13:48:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T03:48:55","slug":"luna-abyss-our-horrors-reflected-at-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2026\/08\/26\/luna-abyss-our-horrors-reflected-at-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Luna Abyss: Our Horrors Reflected at Us."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s funny to think about how there’s some genres which by default I’ll avoid but should parts of them, even some would say the very core parts of them, find their way into other genres I’ll find myself strangely drawn to them. Bullet hells are a great example of this for me as I’ve passed on pretty much every title that takes the form of the standard, twin stick style shooter one that genre made popular. Invert the core premise though? Hell yeah I’m there for almost any kind of bullet heaven (nee Vampire Survivors clone) title you’ll put in front of me. Make it a FPS or third person shooter instead of a top down 2D experience? Again I’m right there for anything by Housemarque <\/a>or, at a stretch, things along the lines of PlatinumGames’ Nier:Automtata<\/a>. This is probably why Luna Abyss appealed to me in the first place although I was also in the mood for something boomer-shooteresque which it also seemed to take heavy inspiration from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Your red eyes were what doomed you. Shunned by the rest of society you eventually found yourself on the wrong side of the law, although whether or not that was your fault is academic at this point. The fate that awaits you is thousands of days of service on on Luna, the strange mirror image of our own moon which hides within it all sorts of untold riches and horrors. Should you wish you could send your days in idle captivity, hoping that you’ll keep your sanity after 2 decades, or should you wish you can take up the offer of Aylin, you warden, to dive into the abyss and bring back tech for the betterment of humanity. In reality there wasn’t that much choice at all once you think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was about to write how Luna Abyss reminded me of Unreal games of yore, the ones that always that used the default lighting pack which always seemed to give everything this glossy, over done specular reflections that that engine was known for. Well it turns out this game has been in development for 7 years<\/em> which firmly puts it back at the time when that exact aesthetic was running rampant through any game that cared to use the engine. The decision to stick on that engine likely speaks to a lot of the other quirks and oddities that show up in Luna Abyss as nearly any other dev would’ve made the switch to the more modern Unreal 5 engine given it released back in 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The long winded genre word salad that describes Luna Abyss 5 is a first person bullet hell boomer shooter platformer which, like all good run on descriptions, tells you enough but not all of what this game is. The boomer shooter aspect is softened some what by the inclusion of a core auto-aim mechanic as well as some light RPG elements in the form of permanent upgrades that you can find scattered throughout the map. The platformer aspect starts off as your standard precision 3D jump puzzles style game but quickly evolves to include a number of other mechanics to make those sections more challenging. The bullet hell part takes direct inspiration from the games I mentioned previously, pitting you against an array of enemies that fire all sorts of slow moving projectiles at you which you have to dodge. This all comes together relatively well but the game feels littered with the remnants of ambition that was never fully realised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Combat captures that boomer-shooter aesthetic well with everything being slick, fast paced and frenetic. It takes some time to build out your arsenal, each of the guns only being unlocked at specific points in the story, but once you’ve got more than one the game starts to get a lot more interesting. To be sure none of the guns are a power increase exactly, they’re usually introduced with a mechanic that directly needs them to solve, but having variety makes the combat sections less of a grind. It does start to get repetitive in the second half of the game however as there’s not a lot of variety in the enemy types. Bosses are definitely a highlight although they tend to be more combat styled puzzles more than they are your usual FPS boss affair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The platforming is OK<\/em> in that it works as you’d expect with I’d say about 50\/50 chance of deaths being actually your fault. Whilst there were definitely times I got a bit ahead of myself, thinking I could one shot a platforming section blind, there were equally as many times when an ability wouldn’t fire, some interaction wouldn’t work or I was so firmly out of bounds that I’d fall to my death inadvertently. Thankfully the checkpoint system is pretty generous so you’re never losing that much progress but it can be rather frustrating to get through a platform section only to die because your dash didn’t get you through a barrier for whatever reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If anything speaks to the ambition the devs held for this game it’s the story. It definitely takes heavy inspiration in the way it’s presented from the FromSoftware games what with it’s eerie setting, aloof residents who speak in riddles and the numerous bits of story locked behind walls of text that are littered around the place. I can’t divine exactly what it is they wanted to do (although the small overworld section gives the impression there were more areas they wanted to add but didn’t have the time for) but there was so much build up and world building that I got the feeling this was going to be a game that was far longer than it eventually ended up being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not that it really needed to though as overall I think it got its main themes across well enough, as well as giving all the characters plenty of time to develop over my playthrough. What was missing for me was a reason to care for them as you’re kind of put in the middle of a narrative that’s already happened so you, as the protagonist, are playing catchup on everything. That certainly robs you of any kind of sense of agency for the main character who is effectively just used so others can tell their story. Maybe that’s the whole point and I’m missing something here but I certainly didn’t have much emotional resonance with any of the plot points that were going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Luna Abyss then sits that area of games that show that the devs are capable but haven’t yet found their groove as a team. The real shame here is though that immediately after releasing the game the whole studio was laid off so barring them reforming under another umbrella this is the first and last thing we’ll ever see from them. It’s a shame as whilst this wasn’t the most innovative, creating or even interesting game I’ve played of late it was enough to show me that, given another shot, they could probably focus in on what worked, what didn’t and build something really solid. Whether or not that will ever happen though we aren’t to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rating: 7.0\/10<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luna Abyss is available on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 5 right now for $43.95. Game was played on the PC with a total playtime of 7.1 hours and 66% of the achievements unlocked. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s funny to think about how there’s some genres which by default I’ll avoid but should parts of them, even some would say the very…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9,16],"tags":[6537,6086,510,2435,6846,733,839,6402,6449,6401],"class_list":["post-11621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games","category-review","tag-boomer-shooter","tag-bullet-hell","tag-exploration","tag-fps","tag-kwalee-labs","tag-pc","tag-platformer","tag-playstation-5","tag-singleplayer","tag-xbox-series-x"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppBqt-31r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Luna-Abyss-Revierw-Screenshot-Wallpaper-Title-Screen-scaled.png?fit=2560%2C1067&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11621"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11626,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11621\/revisions\/11626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}