As an old-school gamer I’ve been a fan of the point-and-click adventure renaissance that the indie space has helped prompt. While it’s a genre that tends to fall into some classic flaws, whether it's some frustration over hard-to-find critical items or requiring bizarre leaps of faith to solve puzzles, they can still be a good time. The Switch has had a pretty wide array of titles to choose from, ranging from those that are more light-hearted in a classic LucasArts sort of way, to those with a variety of different tones.

Lunar Axe has now arrived with a budget price, a pretty distinctive hand-drawn art style, and a more somber overall tone working to its advantage. It’s actually an interesting experience as well as it feels like it's straddling the line between a classic adventure and your typical story-driven puzzle collection. Granted, the puzzle space has been slowly taking on more adventure elements in terms of story and some moving around, but this feels more like a hybrid of the two styles than normal, so if you’re a fan of both that could be a plus. I suppose the promise of some real-world locations mixing with a story involving some supernatural flair could also be of interest, but since I’m not familiar with the game’s locale I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyway, so at least for me that’s a wash at best.

Moving on to some concerns, while I appreciate some of the visible effort to give the game its own look, I wish some more time had been put into planning how the movement and flow of the player would work out. In most rooms it’s both difficult to see and understand where the exits are in the first place, but this is exacerbated by the fact that your orientation can be thrown off pretty easily, so where the exits lead doesn’t always make sense. Then throw in the fact that there isn’t a map and navigating through areas can be frustrating at times. In addition, the included mini games and puzzles are a mixed bag. I think the most disappointing tend to be the hidden object puzzles as they typically have very few items to look for, and in some cases the game’s custom art does you no favors in helping you find some of the objects. This is in heavy contrast to many titles on the system that have far more objects but also much more clarity helping make it possible to find them more consistently. 

Putting it all together, though you can see the effort, and the game has a budget-friendly price, it’s still difficult to feel inclined to recommend. The fact is, games of this general type are a dime a dozen in the eShop already, and most of them are already budget priced themselves as well. I do appreciate the attempt here, and there are aspects of the experience that work well enough, but it has enough frustrations and shortcomings that it doesn’t perform well against its peers.