I’ve never really played an isometric platform adventure game, but when a love letter to a genre has this much evident passion it gets me interested.

Lumo is mainly the work of one person, Gareth Noyce. He grew up on “isometric arcade adventures” in the UK where their popularity exploded after Tim & Chris Stamper’s Knight Lore for the ZX Spectrum. This inspired many more such as Head Over Heels and many got ports all over the gaming computer landscape. Lumo has one foot in this past and another in modern times, incorporating more recent innovations like physics systems and in-game maps.

After the framing story of being sucked into a computer at some kind of tiny retro gaming fair, you find yourself as a squat wizard, navigating connected rooms floating in a void. In isometric tradition, the game world is viewed from a three-quarters perspective, although again the modern touch allows free movement with the analogue stick or stricter D-pad control, along with the option of orienting your directional inputs diagonally. Death comes quickly in these mini action-puzzle challenges, although mistakes aren’t punished very severely… at least not until the back half of the game when rooms and levels start getting bigger and multi-room tasks become more common.

As the game ramps up to this, I felt challenged fairly, although I did struggle with navigation when the levels became more sprawling. The maps help but you still have to pay attention, and it’s also possible to miss collecting them. There’s other collectibles too, from contextual items and keys to hidden tapes, to coins which allow access to bonus games based on other games of the era like Q*bert or Marble Madness.

Then there’s the secrets. It’s not just a genre pastiche, Lumo is loaded with sly winks and nods to classics of the genre and the Spectrum-adjacent scene; from screenshots pasted on walls to the inclusion of the intentionally cheesy pop song “Hold My Hand Very Tightly”, originally recorded by staff of Your Sinclair magazine on the giveaway cassette that normally contained games and demos. The list of names in the credits is a good primer for landmark creators in this sphere.

Anyway, this is all very charming but the game itself has some rough edges. The simplistic art style seems intentional although it does have that “default assets” feel. The physics system leads to the occasional awkward interaction, and the diagonal perspective (while I acknowledge it’s the whole point of the game) creates some issues with moving around hazards. You can tilt the view slightly but it’s not enough to get around the depth issues that crop up.

Still, taking the game in the spirit in which it’s intended it’s a very nice homage, in conversation with this now creaky and superseded genre and bringing it up to date with smoother controls, and forgiving mechanics like infinite lives (although a classic mode is available for the masochistic). I’m not in a rush to replay it to find the many missing secrets, but I’m keen to at least look online for spoilers; I only got to two of the six bonus games after all!