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Architect: not a credit you expect to see in a game's post-victory crawl. Perhaps you should. Somebody had to blueprint the Citadel, the Cradle, the Skycrown battlements where I've bludgeoned so many demons and helped raise so many catapults. Games get built, even if the building blocks themselves are little more than light, and the scaffolds are scaffolds of code.Lumino City has an architect - and it's the architecture that makes the most lasting impression here. Like Lume before it, State of Play's latest takes place against a backdrop of physical models, pieced together from cardboard and wiring and doll's furniture and scraps of felt. The narrative follows a girl named Lumi who's looking for her missing grandfather, but the real story is one of constant discovery and delight: each screen in this point-and-click puzzle adventure taking you somewhere ingenious and new.
It's a massive expansion in terms of scope and scale. Lume was a clever piece of work, but it had the look of an afternoon's fun that got seriously out of hand. Doors were drawn on walls in felt pen, and camera movements had a sweet and homely shakiness to them. Lumino City is sprawling and intricate, and every finial and fusebox speaks of a deep sense of craft. The metropolis you pick a path through has real variety, from sheer pasteboard cliffs where little cage-fronted shanties move in and out with the shifting of unseen cogwork, to a security hut that's built from an old camera. There's a wonderful eye for dreamlike detail: way up high on the arching back of a giant flywheel you'll find a ship that has come to rest, far from the ocean, while its captain slumbers in a sagging hammock. Elsewhere, there's a perfect Airstream diner, the size, most likely, of a milk bottle, resting near a clutter of copper piping. Like every good indie video game, Lumino City has a lighthouse, but this lighthouse has a lens of thick, deeply scored glass. It all adds up to an astonishing place to explore: a modern Trumpton or Camberwick Green.
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