Beware of delving too deep
Luna Abyss is a soulslike, although it’s more on the roguelike end of the spectrum. A mythic sci-fi story from the small UK based developer Bonsai Collective, it tells the story of a world in which a new moon arrived in Earth orbit and changed everything.
It is very definitely post-apocalyptic, but the bounds of that apocalypse are tantalisingly never quite fully laid out—it’s hinted that when the moon arrived, it devastated Earth, but the game itself takes place entirely on the new moon, and the colony that established itself there has, too, been largely destroyed.
Left in its wake is a prison system that sends inmates down into the colony and the moon’s depths to retrieve lost tech and, occasionally, hunt criminals.
Your character comes from Earth and was selected for imprisonment not because of a crime but because of a random(?) change in your physicality which marked you out as someone the All-Father declared should work on these reclamation runs.
Given a 9,000 day target to work off, with bonus deductions for successfully completed retrievals and goals, you have a long way to go.
The game is pretty linear, although I don’t think that’s really a criticism. There is some backtracking later on as you get the chance to go places and explore secrets new abilities make possible, but they’re relatively minor, and I didn’t get bored in the exploration because the goodies you find are always interesting or useful.
The story is told largely through found artefacts, with hints and conversations with enigmatic NPCs leading your progress. There’s a light reliance on Norse myth (with the presence of the All-Father being the central conceit), but this is a techno-mythology, and the only supernatural element is this second moon and its presence over the Earth.
All of which goes to say that the story has some familiar tropes but deploys them in its real interests, which is about confinement, illness as life, loss as driving force and how fate (or chance, depending on your bent) governs us and remains inexplicable no matter how hard we fight to understand.
The mechanics are nice and chunky, and they do not punish you for their own shortcomings—one of my biggest beefs with soulslikes and action RPGs is how you can die because you get stuck in a wall while an antagonist swings through it, or a sequence gets locked in and no matter what you do it can’t be broken. These feel like punishments because of poor design and have had me walk away from a game because I don’t have time to push through shitty design masquerading as difficulty.
As a result, platforming sections and big boss fights never feel like they’re trying to trick you into disaster for the fun of it—their challenge is in there on itself, and you beating it isn’t a fight with the controls but in learning how the game works and then navigating that difficulty. This is my kind of challenge.
The colour and sound are coherent; the music in particular is atmospheric and really elevates the setting, which is techno-organic with a sense that pipes might come alive or walls breath when you’re not looking. The saturated reds and blues that feature strongly give Luna Abyss a strong sense of identity, and are used to do more than simply paint the screen.
Bonsai Collective have delivered a strong and very playable game here.
The reason I play games, though, is for the narrative (I’m not your person to review MMOs because I HATE grind). Luna Abyss’s story works for me. It’s a touch opaque at times, and you need to slow down and piece things together to understand all the nuances here, but even someone paying no attention is going to pick up the broad strokes of families at war, of ambitions defeated and the idea that we make our own dooms. In Luna Abyss, the road to hell was absolutely paved with good intentions.
For a small studio, this is a big game with a satisfying story.
Highlights:
- Great gameplay
- Fabulous mythic SF story
- Fabulous character design
Nerd coefficient: 6/10, a great game with really enjoyable gameplay and an interesting story.
Reference: Luna Abyss [Bonsai Collective, 2026].
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.