Luma Island is a cozy adventure game with a unique goal: providing experiences that are enjoyable for lifelong gamers, casual gamers, and first-time gamers. If you’re less experienced or simply want to relax as you build your perfect homestead, you can do that. If you want to take on the challenge of exploring caves and temples, you can do that too. You can play solo or with up to four players in co-op. It’s all up to you.That freedom of choice starts right at the beginning of the game. Once you’ve designed your character, you’ll start a new life on Luma Island with nothing but some tools and a small trailer to sleep in. After a quick tutorial, your first major task will be to visit the nearby town to pick your profession. You’ll have seven options to choose from: cook, brewer, treasure hunter, blacksmith, fisherman, jewelrycrafter, and archeologist.This choice is more than just some flavor for your character, it’s an important decision that will determine your character’s goals, some of which are tougher than others. Each profession is clearly labeled with a difficulty level, so you won’t be choosing blindly. Picking a starting profession also doesn’t lock you out of the others. You can be all seven professions if you’d like. Your first choice is free, but from that point on, adding new professions will cost in-game money. If you’re playing co-op, everyone can choose their own separate profession; you’re not locked into following the same path as your friends.The easiest professions — such as cook and brewer — are focused on gathering materials on your homestead. You’ll use an axe to gather wood and a pickaxe to gather stone, then use those materials to build craft benches like a sawmill or kiln. You’ll then use these craft benches to turn your wood and stone into more complicated materials, which will then be used to create more advanced recipes.Upgrading your tools will make it easier to gather rare materials, which open up even more things you can make. And using a hoe, you can turn patches of grass into farmable land, where you can plant and water seeds to grow crops. That gives you full control over how far your homestead expands.This gameplay loop means you’ll consistently have new goals to work toward to master your profession and expand your homestead. If you focus on farming and gathering, you won’t find yourself in dangerous situations very often, making these professions the ideal choice for new gamers or people who want a simple, relaxing experience. You’ll be spending your time gathering, building, planting, and enjoying the game’s vibrant environments and soothing soundtrack.If you’re a more experienced player or are looking for more of a challenge, the hardest professions — such as jewelrycrafter and archeologist — will be more your speed. These professions require searching for loot in Luma Island’s dangerous caves and temples, which have traps and wild animals that will attack on sight. So you’ll need to have a whip at the ready.Temples and caves have different rewards and provide different challenges. For example, temples might be full of traps that require you to pay attention to your surroundings. Caves are pitch black and require you to craft torches and strategically place them so you can see where you’re going and where you might get attacked. They each have a different way of keeping you on your toes, but they also hold unique rewards like new blueprints and particularly valuable loot. If you die while in a cave or temple, you’ll lose some of the resources you gathered during that trip. When you enter them, a new section of the HUD will be added that says “lost on death.” As you might expect, you’ll lose the items displayed in that section if you die. Luckily, if you ever get to a point where you want to evacuate a dungeon, each room provides a way for you to escape without having to backtrack all the way to the beginning.This temple exploration can also lead you to solve the big mystery of the island. In town, there’s a sealed temple that you need ancient keys to open. Completing temples in each zone will reward you with tablets that will open that zone’s final sanctuary. There, you can find the ancient keys needed to open the sealed temple. What lies within? You’ll just have to figure that out for yourself.Regardless of what profession you choose, you’ll need some help from magical creatures called Lumas. You get them by finding and hatching Luma Eggs, and there are 15 unique Lumas in the game. Once they’ve hatched, they’ll help you find treasure and provide you with Luma Energy, a resource that is needed for recipes of all professions.Ultimately, Luma Island is all about giving you options and letting you choose how you want to play it. Alone, with friends, as one profession, as all of them, or anywhere in between. It’s developed and self-published by indie studio Feel Free Games, will be available on PC, and is planned to release later this year. You can wishlist the game on Steam or join the community on Discord.
