Ever wondered what would happen if a bunch of architects, prop-makers, fine artists, musicians and animators got together and decided to make a computer game? Well, if you’ve played any of the games created by State of Play, particularly Lume, then you’ll know the answer to that. You’ll also be as chuffed as I am that they have released a sequel to the aforementioned, and it’s every bit as exquisite as the first.
Lumino City is a gigantic hodgepodge of reconstituted buildings, railways, train carriages, storage containers, boats and water wheels that precariously stretches into the clouds. Our limber marionette Lumi (the put-upon protagonist of Lume) once again is thrust onto a mysterious trail of discovery, because somewhere within the city’s catacombs is her kidnapped grandfather.
Lumi must follow the trail of clues not only to find him, but to find out who he really is, and at the same time solve all of the various social and technical problems of the city and its bizarre inhabitants (like a mayor with memory loss and a Professor Umbridge-esque obsession with cats). Ascending higher and higher into the clouds to Critchley’s lilting music, you scale the city like a spider, climbing ladders, sliding down bunting, getting hoisted about on hooks and winches, with the odd zip-line thrown in for good measure.
With the aid of your Handy Manual you must decipher your way through puzzles, patterns and circuit boards in order to get the poor city up and running again. Not as easy as it seems though, considering you have to first figure out what page of the manual the relevant technical advice is on. And there’s a thousand pages. Nevertheless, I found myself on more than one occasion simply reading irrelevant pages that caught my eye (albeit squinting hard to do so).
The Handy Manual represents the extraordinary attention to detail that is present throughout the entire game, right down to the motes of dust floating in the sunbeams coming through an open window. It’s easy to sense the fun being had and to reciprocate the joy of these game designers as they revel in the tactile rewards of this interdisciplinary behemoth of a set model.
And the game is a real reward for their hard work, a hand-crafted thing of technical and artistic beauty. Kudos to Luke and his team for ever proving that computer games are just as capable of achieving high art status as any other discipline. Keep them coming, and always remember - treat the lemon well, and the lemon will treat you!
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