The Luna Abyss Demo is a Visually Spectacular, but Sedentary "Bullet-Hell" - Next Fest Demo Preview

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I heard the name Luna Abyss, and I had somehow concocted in my head that it was perhaps some sort of cutesy cozy game. As it happens, I probably couldn't have been much further from the truth. Rather, Luna Abyss is a first-person bullet-hell shooter from Kwalee, the publishers of games like The Precinct and Town to City.

Luna Abyss Demo - Gameplay Impressions

The first thing that strikes you when you hop into Luna Abyss is the visuals; the game very much plays on the contrast between light and dark in a visual sense. Many areas in the game feature dark rooms, filled with light-emitting objects and reflective surfaces. This has the two-fold benefit of creating a great atmosphere for the game, while making enemy projectiles really stand out, which is very important.

When it comes to the combat, Luna Abyss is a mixed bag. The weapons are quite fun to use, and the enemies pose a decent challenge, firing bullets at you in patterns. The auto-aim essentially manages all aiming for you with a lock-on system. The game is very much a 3D Bullet-hell situation where you have to be quite aware of your surroundings, and taking a few hits is pretty much game over, but the movement options available to the player don't quite match the combat.

For instance, there is a "dash" mechanic, but it's very much a dash, not a dodge. It's limited in sideways movement, and when going forward or backward, the movement is so immediate and hard to control that it can often get you killed on more open maps with bottomless pits. It's designed for leaping over wide gaps, not dodging bullets.

It feels a little juxta-posed to be in a bullet hell kind of situation with projectiles all around you, but also be limited in your movement capability, with walking being your main way to avoid bullets. Also, the bullets are shot in patterns, meaning 90% of what the enemies fire can be ignored, as they're just firing off into random space, nowhere near you. There are occasional enemies that direct their fire, and they are much more of a threat than the majority, which "dumb fire" their projectiles.

Besides the slow combat, one thing I wished were in the game was a flashlight; while the lighting is a nice addition, some areas are really dark, which can make certain platforms or paths very difficult to see. This was probably exacerbated by playing on the OLED Steam Deck.

Luna Abyss Demo - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Luna Abyss runs surprisingly well on the Steam Deck. The controls are well-suited to controllers, and the performance can also be good without sacrificing the visual quality.

Running the demo on largely Medium settings, with FSR set to Quality mode, gives us a good-looking game that maintains 60 FPS throughout the vast majority of the available gameplay. I did run into a section of the demo that was oddly more intensive than any other area, resulting in drops into the low 50s, and very rarely into the 40s. Hopefully, we could see optimizations there for the full game.

Regardless, Luna Abyss should be very playable on the Steam Deck when it launches later this year.

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