Luto Preview

Luto is a puzzle/horror game developed by Broken Bird Games, showing heavy inspiration from other horror titles like P.T. and Visage. The demo I played was a standalone experience called “The Choice”, following someone who is trapped in a house but is seemingly not alone.

Visually, the game does little to stand out, which may lead it to be lost in the crowd of similar-looking titles. Despite this, it has a fantastic-looking environment, dark and gloomy, without being visually bland. The colour really stands out where it is used, such as in the child’s room and the drawings. The architecture is also incredibly… distinct. Exploring the house will lead to some strange discoveries, such as an endlessly high ceiling, incredibly long corridors, and drab, grey basements with endless pits. This extends even to some rooms and doors that lead to entirely impossible locations, which makes exploration incredibly unique. Luto nearly exclusively uses environmental storytelling (which works incredibly well), telling a mysterious story but leaving enough to the mind for theorisation and ideas. This, combined with the game's visuals and fantastic sound design, makes for a fantastically thick atmosphere. Constantly building tension leads to incredibly well-crafted scares. While the game isn’t outright terrifying, it definitely manages to be very disconcerting.

The gameplay is very standard for the genre but by no means bad, primarily focusing on simple puzzles and exploration. The puzzles in the demo were all relatively simple but were more than adequate to help push the story along. Much of the time, I found that the environment was incredibly similar, which occasionally made exploration somewhat of a pain. However, this was rarely a problem and will hopefully not be too much of an issue in the full game, with ideally a bigger variety of areas.

I had an incredible experience with Luto, and I think it holds the potential to be a fantastic horror game if it receives improvements. I would highly recommend playing the demo, which is freely available on Steam currently, through the next fest event. Definitely keep an eye on this one!