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In a world of video games where originality is becoming extremely rare, Luna Abyss arrives like a breath of freezingly cold air. From the moment you take your first steps into the Abyss, the oppressive, hardly even lit corridors of this strange and hostile world, you immediately know that you are dealing with something quite different.
Not different in the way publishers like to describe their games in press releases, but truly, meaningfully different. The kind of different that makes you sit up straight and pay closer attention. And the shooting mechanics? Well, I will get to those, because I simply have not experienced anything quite like them before.
A Cryptic World Worth Deciphering
Luna Abyss wastes no time in throwing you directly into its lore, and I will be honest with you: at first, it is a lot to take in. The story is cryptic, mysterious, and at times almost intentionally obscure, and you will spend a good portion of the opening hours feeling really confused, piecing things together as you go. This is not a flaw at all, but it is worth knowing before you sit down with it.
You play as Fawkes, a prisoner from Earth who has been sent to Red Moon to serve her sentence. The way this works is fascinating. Prisoners are assigned to jump into Wardens, some kind of exosuits controlled entirely by the mind, and carry out missions on behalf of a mysterious overseer known only as the All-Father.
Complete a mission successfully, and your sentence is reduced by a number of days. Fawkes herself is serving 9,000 days, which is a number that tells you everything you need to know about the severity of whatever she did to end up here, although she claims that she was wrongly accused.
From the very first encounter with her handler, Aylin, it becomes clear that Fawkes is no ordinary prisoner. There is something special about her, something that the game teases carefully and cleverly, and it is precisely this sense of intrigue that keeps you invested even when the lore starts overwhelming you. The more you play, the clearer things become, and the story rewards patience in a real meaning of that word.
A Shooter Unlike Anything I Have Played Before
If the story is the hook, the gameplay is the thing that will make Luna Abyss a talked-about game when it finally releases in full; I'm sure about that. It is a fast-paced shooter, drawing clear inspiration from the Doom games in terms of the momentum and the constant pressure it places on the player. You have an arsenal of weapons at your disposal: an automatic rifle, a shotgun, a sniper, and more, with further additions promised as you progress through the full game.
The clever twist here is the ammunition system. There is none. The guns do not run out of bullets; instead, they overheat. It sounds like a small change, but in practice, it transforms the way you engage with combat entirely. Your focus is never pulled away from the action to count rounds or hunt for ammo pickups. You are always in it, always moving, and it works beautifully.
But the real revelation, and I genuinely cannot stress this enough, is the enemy behaviour. I have played a great many shooters over the years, and I cannot recall seeing anything quite like what Luna Abyss does here. The enemies fire orbs at you, and these orbs do not simply travel in a straight line towards your position. They move in circles, forming elaborate spiral patterns as they leave the shooter, starting concentrated and spreading outward as they close in on you.
The more enemies present in an encounter, the more orbs fill the space, and the result is something that looks almost choreographed. Every single encounter is, in the most literal sense of the phrase, a work of art. It is chaos, beautiful and deadly chaos, and you will either learn to read it and thrive or you will die in it repeatedly.
The boss encounters take everything the regular enemies do and multiply it several times over. Strategy becomes essential, pattern recognition becomes critical, and the satisfaction of finally overcoming a boss after several attempts is immense. I never once found myself bored of the shooting, which, for a shooter, is precisely what you want to hear.
Traversal is another star that shines quite bright in Luna Abyss. Jumps, double jumps, dashes, teleporting and more give you a versatile movement toolkit that complements the combat perfectly. The one area where the game falls slightly short, at least in this preview portion, is exploration.
The levels are beautifully designed without question, but they are also quite linear, and every collectable, whether health upgrades or lore documents, sits plainly on the obvious path rather than tucked away in corners that reward curiosity. It is a minor disappointment in an otherwise exceptional gameplay package, and one can only hope the full release addresses it.
A Visual and Sound Perfection
Visually, Luna Abyss is simply stunning, and that is not a word I reach for lightly. The contrast between dark and light is handled with real skill, the reddish tones that dominate the Abyss fitting the atmosphere like a glove. When you encounter a blue light source in all that red and darkness, the contrast is quite amazing. The reflections on water and smooth surfaces are beautifully rendered, and the environmental design is confident and distinctive throughout.
The first few levels might lead you to think you have a full measure of the game's visual ambition, but as you progress, Luna Abyss pulls you outside and reveals Red Moon's twisted interpretation of nature, and it is quite something to behold. The visual design is, in a word, perfect.
What makes all of this even more impressive is the performance. Throughout my entire time with the preview build, on my PC, the frame rate sat comfortably above 200 FPS, and I genuinely am not sure how the developers have managed it. However they did it, it was remarkable.
The sound design matches the visuals every step of the way. The music is good, the voice acting is phenomenal, and the environmental sounds are just perfect for the world being built around them.
Conclusion
Luna Abyss is one of those rare previews that leaves you genuinely impatient for the full release. The shooting is unlike anything I have encountered before, the world is visually and atmospherically extraordinary, and the story, cryptic as it is, has more than enough intrigue to keep you invested. If the full game delivers on the promise of what I played here, we could be looking at one of the most exciting shooters in recent memory. Trust me on this one.
