At first, Lorn's Lure feels like an escape. The first-person caving sim is set in a vast, sad landscape of pipes and silos, ancient turbines, and concrete cliffs, where emergency lighting and broken bridges create chaotic platform routes into the darkness.
I came away with precious memories of similarly immersive spaces in other works of art: the vastness of Gormenghast and Feersum Endjinn, the fractal traps of Yedoma Globula, the living geography of Xenoblade Chronicles. I looked at the climbing axes in my hands, listened to the indelible clack of my android feet, and thought: here’s another playground. I’m going to do well here. I’m going to jump off things, climb things, and go wherever I want. I’m going to take screenshots from heights and make gravity my friend. But gravity is not my friend, and Lorn’s Lure (out on Steam now) is not a playground. It kills you instantly if you fall too fast, as measured by the three-hit speedometer on your HUD, and those climbing axes require stamina, which thankfully doesn’t drain while you’re suspended in place, desperately searching for the next foothold.
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Appreciating the space of the environment requires you to work within the bubble of shifting possibility created by these abilities and capacities—another, more elusive kind of space, imperfectly nestled within the environment. It requires you to stop perceiving the gorgeously barren world, at least to begin with, and merely sense that fluctuating membrane between a clean landing and a respawn. Thankfully, these respawns are generous, even to the point of flattery. The game will often respawn you on the last patch of flat land you landed on, even if you barely touched down. When the game revives you further back, it’s usually because it’s trying to properly frame the route for you, marking something you missed.
If it sounds like I'm making a big song and dance out of the routine observation that the difficulty of a platformer is the difference between your skill and the terrain, that's probably because I'm also pushing the basics, because Lorn's Lure makes first-person platformers feel new again. New and eerie and, at times, downright infuriating.
It eschews the flashier, more showy signposts of games like Assassin’s Creed and Mirror’s Edge. Its environmental cues and nudges are dark and uninviting: in a “yellow paint game” that aims to minimise uncertainty, bits of scenery that the developers want you to ignore, dismiss as noise, would be the backdrop of an invisible wall. But they’re there, artfully positioned to block the eye, and their stark presentation makes them fascinating. I haven’t had to think this carefully about angles and textures in years, or even since the original Tomb Raider. There are walls you can climb, and many you can’t. There are slopes that push you towards your death, and others you can climb or “surf” by leaning over the surface and leaping to reset the arc of your slide—others that are perhaps a few degrees different from the first.
The “platforms” are often so narrow that standing on them feels like cheating. You look at every crooked beam, recessed pipe, or piece of cladding and think “surely not,” over and over again. The feeling of “cheating” the geography has a thematic resonance, since there’s a chance the whole thing is a projection. The story here is that you chase a visual glitch deep into the structure—which, by extrapolation, begins to feel like a digital hallucination, no matter how grungy and dirty. Once you’ve completed a section, each attempt is described as a “failed simulation.” How straightforwardly Lorn’s Lure intends this to read? I’m not yet sure after a few sections, but one effect is to give the platforming a friction of unreality, balanced between tactile caving and cheese-like traversal of the terrain.
The world is begging to be short-circuited, to be outmaneuvered, with spam inputs and stubbornly warping into cracks, tricking the laws of physics into giving you upward momentum, but it never tells you whether you’ve truly escaped the developer’s designs and whether pushing contours or underestimating the critical path is part of the plan.
The game’s story, meanwhile, is told through the scannable machines and digital journal entries you encounter, as well as the changing surface materials—the remnants of previous android explorers, some of whom went mad. Encountering a new type of texture, an exotic shade of concrete or steel, is a story event. When you encounter a type of metal that’s actually reflective, freshly hammered or polished, in a landscape of dirt and rust, it’s a source of tension. What could possibly lie beyond? In short: consider me utterly captivated.