{"id":974484,"date":"2026-01-05T05:43:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T05:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cmbX64EjB2ganPZjRfxJmj"},"modified":"2026-01-05T05:43:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T05:43:25","slug":"i-died-more-than-1200-times-in-this-panicky-first-person-riff-on-celestes-platforming-and-its-now-one-of-my-favorite-games-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/i-died-more-than-1200-times-in-this-panicky-first-person-riff-on-celestes-platforming-and-its-now-one-of-my-favorite-games-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"I died more than 1,200 times in this panicky first-person riff on Celeste’s platforming and it’s now one of my favorite games of the year"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I knew I was afraid of heights going into Lorn\u2019s Lure<\/a>. It's a fear that I\u2019ve always mined for thrills in games, climbing high towers and leaping off them for the adrenaline. Of course I was going to play a sci-fi mountaineering adventure through the bowels of an impossibly massive brutalist megastructure. What I was not prepared for was discovering that I might also be afraid of the dark. And tight spaces. As Lorn's Lure constricted into a choking warren of pitch black tunnels, it taught me new and exciting forms of dread.<\/p>\n

I was least prepared to discover that over the course of its eight massive levels, Lorn\u2019s Lure evolves into a twitchy, panicky first-person Celeste, full of air-dashing, wall-jumping and precise stamina management. Realizing that, I shouldn\u2019t be surprised that I died over 1200 deaths (approximately 110 per hour) before the credits rolled. And I\u2019ve only just begun unlocking the optional \u2018simulation\u2019 levels\u2014equivalent to Celeste\u2019s brutally tough B-side stages. But I'm getting ahead of myself.<\/p>\n

Pleasantly haunted<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve been excited for Lorn\u2019s Lure ever since playing an early prototype in 2021\u2019s excellent Haunted PS1 Demo Disc<\/a>. Inspired by the amazing architectural panoramas of classic \u2018Cyber dungeon quest\u2019 manga BLAME!<\/a>, Lorn\u2019s Lure is a low-fi first-person platformer about an android following a \u2018glitch\u2019 in their vision into the guts of a seemingly endless industrial structure. All concrete and crumbling pipework, with ruins of civilizations lining the halls through strata millennia deep. While there\u2019s an interesting story here, it\u2019s told through the environment and fragments of text, with only a couple characters encountered in your solitary exploration.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 10,000 opportunities to die here, alone in the darkness. While there\u2019s no monsters or combat, gravity and hubris are powerful enough antagonists. Fortunately you\u2019re a robot and good at math, so deaths are framed as failed simulations. Goof up, and you immediately rewind to your last solid foothold, trying fiddly jumps as many times as needed, keeping frustration low outside of a few endurance segments. That doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s easy: Lorn\u2019s Lure pushed me hard, and I had to take a few breaks to cool down. But the tension and ever-changing environments kept me coming back once I\u2019d caught my breath and centered myself.<\/p>\n

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\"Lorn's<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

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\"Lorn's<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

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While I was stubborn enough to navigate through the whole game under my own power, there is a hint system that will point you to the next key location you\u2019ll need to climb to, but don\u2019t expect much else in the way of help. Some of the jumps the game demands in the later levels are incredibly precise and high pressure, even once you\u2019ve figured out exactly what the game is asking of you. That brain-teasing is what hooked me. Lorn\u2019s Lure likes to present you a distant, visible destination and a tangled mess of outcroppings, pipes and flat concrete walls (which you can traverse with your climbing picks at the cost of stamina) between you and it, and then leave you to figure out the path.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s often multiple workable routes (the number increasing as you unlock more movement techniques) but you\u2019ll still have to stop and ponder how you can use your tools to navigate from A to B. Doubly so when you\u2019re hunting for the optional crystals scattered around each level, hidden in out-of-the-way places that require full mastery of the game\u2019s movement. Like Celeste\u2019s cherries, they\u2019re entirely optional, but collecting all the crystals in a chapter unlocks a bonus stage which really drills deep into the game\u2019s mechanics, giving you just one life (any mistake zips you back to the start) to clear a precision obstacle course inspired by the chapter it\u2019s attached to. After a dozen hours I\u2019ve only seen two of a total eight.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Falling down\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Each of the eight chapters (none taking me less than an hour to complete the first time through, and several clocking in at 90+ minutes) feels like a completely different experience. The first level is a slow exploration through crumbling pipeworks and flat concrete structures, letting you get used to the climbing picks. The second stage is a straight vertical descent through a mass of machinery and rebar hanging from a ceiling miles above, followed by a tricky return to the top. The third stage is a harrowing caving expedition through crawling-height tunnels lit only by your own flares. Each has a new aesthetic, a new flow to its gameplay and navigation, and the low-fi PSX aesthetics have allowed solo developer Rubeki to build environments that live up to the manga inspirations, full of implied history and layers of decay.<\/p>\n

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