About The Game

You play as Fawkes, a prisoner sentenced to explore a massive, derelict megastructure deep beneath the surface of Luna, a "mimic moon." Your handler, an artificial guard named Aylin, tasks you with recovering lost technology from the ruins of a once-prosperous colony. The story leans into existential dread, blending cosmic horror with a centuries-spanning mystery about a doomed civilization. Combat is fast and reactive. You’ll be dodging swarms of projectiles while managing weapon-specific cooldowns. The game forces strategy through weapon-shield interactions. You’ll need to swap between a shotgun (blue shields), rifle (purple shields), and launchers to dismantle specific enemy types in the heat of a "bullet dance."  Between combat encounters, the game emphasizes verticality. You’ll use double jumps, dashes, and grappling hooks to navigate brutalist architecture, often requiring platforming precision reminiscent of Destiny 2 or Returnal. The game uses a "sentence-reduction" narrative mechanic, giving players tangible goals as they delve deeper into the Abyss.

History and Inspiration

Luna Abyss wears its influences on its sleeve. It combines the claustrophobic, high-stakes bullet hell combat of Returnal or Nier: Automata (in an interview with Gaming Bolt, the developers cite Nier: Automata for the game's bullet hell inspiration, but personally it reminds me of Returnal) with the environmental storytelling and first person environmental interactivity found in Metroid Prime and the space horror aesthetics of Dead Space. The verticality and geometric forms of the level design channel the brutalist, monolithic aesthetic of the manga BLAME!, favoring massive, empty spaces and cold, harsh lighting that emphasizes the scale of the environment. The developers have cited manga and anime, such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, for the game's narrative inspiration.

Critical Discourse and Player Feedback

The community on r/Games and Steam is currently split. Some players argue that the combat is repetitive on default settings, while veterans are recommending that everyone "crank the difficulty up" to experience the true, punishing intensity of the bullet-hell mechanics. Critics are largely aligned on the atmosphere: the game is "haunting" and "striking" to look at from a distance, though some reviewers have noted that up-close textures can look a bit "muddy" or unrefined.  Unlike many modern RPG-shooters, Luna Abyss is being praised for its lack of bloat. There is no massive skill tree or exhaustive crafting system; it’s a focused, 10–12 hour experience that respects the player's time.

Currently, Luna Abyss has a "Strong" 81 Top Critic Average on OpenCritic, 77% recommended on Steam from 118 ratings, a 4.0/5 average from 217 ratings on Xbox, and a 4.76/5 average on PlayStation from 58 ratings.

Steam seems to be a low-end outlier from a ratings perspective.

Hands-on Impressions

I had seen some previews of Luna Abyss, and was looking forward to checking it out upon release, but I didn't know anything else about it. Little did I realize it was dropping on Gamepass day one. Gamepass has been on fire recently, and Luna Abyss is the latest excellent AA game to come to the service. For gamers not playing on Gamepass, the game launched with a $29.99 retail price, which is a great value considering big publisher games are releasing at $69.99 these days, and Luna Abyss looks excellent and plays great as well. 

The game does start out a little slow, but it didn't bother me at all. The visuals and overall atmosphere are excellent, and the voice acting is really good as well. The story is a little bit of a slow burn, but considering you find yourself playing as a prisoner in a penal colony set on some strange looking red moon and your only companion is a giant floating head, it's obvious this isn't going to be your standard sci-fi FPS story. 

Other than it was an FPS set in space, I didn't know anything about Luna Abyss going in. It was a day-one release on Gamepass, so I decided to play it on my Series S. Man, was I surprised.

Despite a bit of a slow start, Luna Abyss is a great game.

From my experience, the game does a great job balancing the combat and platforming sections, with neither becoming too repetitive. Just about the time I would become exhausted of dodging bullets and killing enemies the game switches to a more narrative section or a platforming section, which helps keep things fresh. And just about the time when I'm getting stressed out from parkouring between platforms and barely  making impossible looking jumps, the game throws a combat encounter at me. The change of pace is nice, and if either portion was the entire game I might not have enjoyed it, but the mix is really great.

The one thing that seemed a bit odd from a game in 2026 was encountering loading sections where the game would freeze for a minute while the next section loaded. It didn't happen often, and I'm not sure how much of that is due to me playing on Series S, but I realized just how rare that is these days. There are certainly level design elements that are classic for allowing preloading of stages to prevent loading delays like that. Perhaps that will get ironed out in a future update. It's certainly not experience breaking in any way, but just feels a bit odd since it's so rare in modern games.

The game also hard locked and crashed on me at one point, but luckily the checkpoints are very generous and I barely lost any progress.

You can watch my beginning gameplay in the video below: