Exploring the: Lorn's Lure Demo
Parkour inside a desolate megastructure filled with the remnants of past explorers and colonies.
Developer and publisher: Rubeki Games
Social Media: Twitter | Patreon | Discord
Lorn’s Lure is a fast-paced, first-person 3D platformer, with gloomy atmosphere, parkour-like gameplay, and a mysterious narrative that will unfold as you explore the desolate megastructure.
I’ve been following the developer of Lorn’s Lure through their Twitter for some time now, and Rubeki’s snippets always peeked my interest, as it showcased a mysterious, large, desolate world that made me ask, “Why are they there? Is there anyone else there?”
From giant structures inside the already giant megastructure, the swift parkour through abandoned buildings and rusted structures, to the ever-present sensation that something else has to be happening here, maybe something luring, it drew me in.
The Megastructure Makes A Great Jungle Gym
The game controls just as tight as Super Meat Boy, and in a way, it’s like a gloomy, arcade Mirror’s Edge. Every movement in the game feels snappy and responsive, whether it’s the climbing, the jumping and wall-jumping, the turning, the sliding, everything feels as quick as it should be, and while it could be argued that the slow ledge climbing animation disrupts the flow; I simply used it to take a breather, as it’s easy to fall to your death in this game. Thankfully, falling to your death is quick and painless, as you swiftly reset back from where you fell.
And the exploration is very fun, and rewarding, with different notes and clues scattered around the area, it promises fulfilling discoveries for anyone who loves to check every corner in every place.
While the demo is somewhat short in length, it gives you enough space and freedom to explore the basic mechanics and to feel the gloom and emptiness around you.
The demo has you acquiring your picks, and then trying to get to reach the “it” from the introduction.
Inside The Wall
The atmosphere, and premise of Lorn’s Lure, is as desolate and grim as one could hope for.
You’re an android from a colony outside the megastructure, and while the sun shines on you, and the bird chirps surround you as you take shade under a tree, you feel trapped. And so, you begin your search through “Everywhere,” in the hope that you would be able to find a way out. But as you set camp on the outskirts of your home colony, a ghost opens a nearby door, and from the darkness, it calls you in, luring you into the void behind the door, and then disappearing before you can reach it.
Now lost, wandering for 253 years, you feel like you don’t belong in this desolate structure, and as your energy core reaches its limit, you hold onto the only thing you have left, your drive to find whatever it was that lured you in, and go down deeper into the structure through a large pipe. There is no other choice, there is nothing else.
You slide down the large pipe, that resembles a tunnel, where you’re instantly surrounded by white noise similar to distant factory fan, and almost the sound of giant construct moving. As you venture through the structure, you find a locked safety hut that belonged to Observers, those who left their home colony to document the outside. This building was here long before you, as you analyze the material and discovered that the rusted building was constructed 534 years ago.
You run through more tunnels, finding odd flora unlike the outside, black, string-like, with blinking red lights, though you can’t be sure that they’re plants, only that the resemble them. You drop from different pipes, quickly and recklessly, falling into a much thinner pipe that collapses with you weight, but softens your fall. After you go through another tunnel, you fall into a rusted pipe, like the one’s you’ve been running through, and now you’re finally inside.
It’s dark, it’s desolate, and there’s as much smoke to see as there is nothing for it to hide. Rusted metal sticks out through the vast concrete walls, some are pipes, others seems to be vents, thought it’s impossible to understand now what’s their purpose. From a far distance, you can see something shining, something sparkling, but while you can’t tell what it is, it draws your attention.
You make your way to it, and once you reach it, see it closer, you realize that it’s a corpse. It’s an Observer, or used to be one, long dead with a strange mass of mold growing through their suit, with two ice axes stabbed on rocks next to it. As they won’t need it, you pick up the ice axes and use them to climb the concrete walls as you venture through this barren megastructure.
You find note in a much larger tunnel, saying that this person has been lost for 673 years, and now their body lacks enough oil to move through the structure safely. They decided to go see the bottom of the structure, and you see a rope that’s falling off the edge, cut off, with the darkness concealing the end.
You find another building, but this one is open, with a communication device, beds, fuel cans, food cans and everything. People had to have been here recently. But you find an activity log, stating that they’ve decided to part ways from “Doffa,” and that they’ll find another supply route because the old one caved in.
You continue your traversal of the structure, running, jumping, and climbing different rusted pipes, falling and sliding down the concrete walls, and always keeping an eye on that which lured you here in the first place. The ghost, changes shapes and size, like a glitch, but as you get closer, it turns into a bird and flies away. But it remains close enough to be seen, close enough for you to follow it.
All Of This Created Many Questions.
Because of the demo, I formed many questions in my head that will hopefully be answered in the game, these only being a few:
What and where is “Everywhere?”
Why did the protagonist feel trapped?
Did someone build the protagonist and what is his colony?
What was that ghost, and why and how did it lure the protagonist in? Is the ghost the lured the protagonist real, and what is it?
Why do colonies want to document or extract from the megastructure?
Are androids building each other and are there any humans left? Are the Observers also Androids?
I also realized that that there’s a metaphor here. The protagonist feels trapped in “Everywhere,” and while they’re trying to find a way out, they’re lured in by a ghost that traps them inside a desolate and rundown megastructure, and in the demo, we see that the ghost they’re trying to reach is a bird. It reminds me of the bird cage metaphor, which symbolizes entrapment, loneliness, unhappiness, or oppression. The bird is locked inside the cage, when they’re supposed to be free. The metaphor has been interpreted for many different themes, so could this be a metaphor for depression?
Hopefully, some of the questions will be answered on the full release, which could potentially be this September.