While I adored many older games when I was playing them in their heyday, there are quite a lot of them for much older systems that can now be truly hard to return to. In particular, I spent a lot of time playing all sorts of games in the Commodore-64 era, loving every moment of a wide variety of titles. Now, through some emulation, it has been wild to return to some of those titles, but typically only for a brief time. The issue, most often, is that many of them simply play poorly, with loose or wonky controls, and that many of them lack much in the way of instruction or helping you get your feet wet, just throwing you into the pool, and hoping for the best. In many ways my time with Lumo 2 felt reminiscent of that experience.

On the positive side, if you’re familiar with older games there’s an element of daring here as Lumo 2 is simply going to do its thing, and do it in its own way. Whether that involves the more predominant platforming and puzzle elements, or the occasional surprise homage to classics that play very differently, it has its look and feel and is running with it. The effort here to include some variety is appreciated, and as a vintage gamer, nods to the past are always a pleasure, even if the implementations may not always be great.

Lumo 2’s biggest problem though is that the platforming action and puzzling that you’ll spend the bulk of your time in, just don’t work all that well. The most odd thing to me is how in some platforming sections your character’s jump reminds me a bit of Impossible Mission way back in the day, but given this is a modern console I’m also not counting that as a compliment. Your accuracy when jumping is a bit of a mess, and when you put that into isometric spaces the problems only seem to multiply as it could be very hard to tell where you were trying to land. It’s a bit odd, the game seems so determined to mine the elements of the past, that it didn’t work out where it should have cleaned things up a bit more. There’s some interest to be found here, but a few too many needless aggravations to go with it.