Lorn's Lure is the anti yellow paint game, a joyful and maddening exploration of sunken megastructures
Gormenghasp
Initially, Lorn’s Lure feels like an escape. A first-person spelunking sim, it takes place in a colossal, mournful extent of pipes and silos, ancient turbines and concrete cliffs, where emergency lighting and broken gantries form scrappy platforming routes into darkness.
I came to it with treasured memories of similarly enveloping spaces in other artworks: the immensities of Gormenghast and Feersum Endjinn, the fractal pitfalls of Yedoma Globula, the living geography of Xenoblade Chronicles. I looked at the climbing axes in my hands, listened to the imperishable clatter of my android feet, and thought: here is another playground. I will do well here. I will jump off things and scamper up things and go wherever I please. I will take screenshots from the heights, and make gravity my friend. But gravity is not my friend, and Lorn’s Lure (out now on Steam) isn’t a playground. It kills you instantly if you fall too fast, as measured by a three-strikes velocity indicator on your HUD, and those climbing axes require stamina, which thankfully isn’t consumed while you’re hanging in place, desperately searching for the next foothold.
Appreciating the space of the setting requires you to work within the shifting bubble of possibility created by these abilities and capacities – another and more elusive kind of space, imperfectly nested within the environment. To begin with, at least, it requires you to stop perceiving the gorgeously barren world, and sense only that wavering membrane between a clean landing and a respawn. Thankfully, those respawns are generous, to the point of flattering. The game will typically resurrect you on the last smidge of level terrain you landed on, even if you barely brushed it. When the game spawns you further back, it’s often because it’s trying to frame the route for you properly, and flag up something you’re missing.
If I sound like I’m making a big song and dance out of the routine observation that a platform game’s challenge is the gap between your abilities and the terrain, well, I probably am. But I’m also belabouring the fundamentals because Lorn’s Lure makes first-person platforming feel new again. New and eldritch and, at times, perfectly maddening.
It avoids the starker, glitzier signposting of games like Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge. Its environmental tells and goads are dingy and uninviting: in a “yellow paint game” that aims to minimise ambiguity, they’d be the parts of the landscape the developers want you to ignore, to dismiss as noise, the backdrop to an invisible wall. But they are there, artfully positioned to intercept the eye, and their spartan presentation makes them fascinating. Not for years, not since the original Tomb Raider, even, have I had to think quite this carefully about angles and textures. There are walls you can climb on, and many others you can’t. There are slopes that slither you to your demise, and others – distinguished from the first by maybe a handful of degrees - which you can "surf" by leaning into the surface and leaping to reset the arc of your slide.
The “platforms” are often so narrow that standing on them feels like cheating. You look at each razor of bent girder or recessed pipe or piece of cladding and think “surely not”, again and again. The feeling that you are “cheating” the geography has thematic resonance, because there’s the possibility that all of this is projection. The story here is that you’re chasing a visual glitch deeper and deeper into the structure – which, by extrapolation, starts to feel like a digital hallucination, however substantially aged and soiled. When you complete a chapter, each attempt is described as a “failed simulation”. How straightforwardly does Lorn’s Lure intend that to be read? I’m not sure yet, after a couple of chapters, but one effect is to lend the platforming a frission of unreality, poised between tactile spelunking and cheesing the terrain.
The world begs to be shortcircuited, overcome by means of spammed inputs and obdurate tilting into crevices so as to trick the physics into granting you upward momentum. But it never tells you when, if at all, you’re actually eluding the developer’s designs, and when your forcing of the contours or disdaining of the critical path is all part of the plan.
The game’s story, meanwhile, is told as much through the changing surface materials as through the scannable machines and digital journal entries you stumble on - the relics of previous android explorers, some of whom have lapsed into madness. Encountering a new species of texture, an exotic hue of concrete or steel, is a story event. When you run into a kind of metal that is actually reflective, freshly forged or polished in a landscape of grime and rust, it’s a source of suspense. What could lie beyond? In short: consider me thoroughly lured.