The isometric soulslike is a small club, and most of its members are easier to respect than to actually enjoy. Lunarium is the one that got me to stay the whole way through.
It follows Ave, a knight in training out of Starfall Village, and Lune, a primordial Starfarer who tags along and fires arrows of light at anything that moves. Their world is being eaten by a blight called the Nihilus, and the roughly twenty hour trip to do something about it is hand drawn, stuffed with secrets, and a lot sharper than the soft art style lets on.
Here is the thing nobody tells you in the first hour. This game looks gentle and plays strict, and the gap between those two facts is where most new players get stuck.
These are the twelve things I wish someone had explained before I spent an evening swinging a sword at a boss that barely flinched.
Parrying isn’t a flex, it’s the damage engine
You can clear regular enemies by dodging and poking at them. You cannot beat bosses that way, or at least not before your controller battery dies.
Ave’s raw sword damage against a healthy boss health bar is close to a rounding error. Real damage comes out of the stagger gauge, and the fastest way to fill that is parrying.
A perfect parry dumps a big chunk into the gauge, while a late or sloppy block adds a sliver. If you have played Sekiro, you already know the shape of a fight where defense is the offense.
The stagger gauge drains if you get shy
Here is the detail that quietly ruined my first few boss attempts. The gauge decays fast if you parry a flurry and then back off to catch your breath.
Lunarium wants a rhythm out of you: parry, hit, parry, hit. Playing it like Dark Souls, where you can circle at range and reset the pace whenever you like, actively undoes the progress you just made.
Get greedy, but in small doses. One or two swings after a parry keeps the meter alive without getting you flattened by the follow up.
Let Lune finish the job
Fill the gauge and Lune steps in with a strike that breaks the enemy outright. What follows is a stun window with a fat damage multiplier attached to it.
Do not waste that window on a light attack combo out of muscle memory. This is where your heavy attacks and your equipped active skill belong, and a clean break against a chapter boss takes a very visible bite out of its health.
Resonance is the resource you should actually be watching
Resonance powers both Lune’s abilities and your perfect dodges, which makes it the most contested number on your screen. New players burn it on flashy light magic and then have nothing in the tank when a boss opens with something unblockable.
My rule after a few hours was simple: always keep at least one dodge worth banked. You can raise your maximum with materials you find out in the world, so put those toward it early rather than hoarding them.
Parry has a cooldown, dodge doesn’t build the gauge
This is the tradeoff the tutorial breezes past. Parry sits on a short cooldown, so mashing it against a four hit combo leaves you standing there with nothing up for the last swing.
Dodging is the safe answer, but it contributes nothing to stagger. A fight where you only dodge is a fight that takes three times as long and gives the boss three times as many chances to catch you.
The actual skill in Lunarium is reading which attacks in a pattern are worth parrying and which ones you should simply not be standing near.
Benches are your whole life support system
Benches are Lunarium’s bonfires, and then some. Sitting at one restores your HP, refills your healing charges, lets you spend Animus on the skill tree, and opens fast travel to every other bench you have lit.
The catch is the one you would expect, since resting respawns most enemies in the area. The useful tell is that clusters of white flowers mean a bench is nearby, so start scanning for them when your charges get thin.
Chop every plant, smash every rock
I ignored the little gatherable bushes and ore deposits for most of the first region, and I paid for it two regions later. Those things are not scenery.
Crafting materials feed your cloak upgrades, your embroidery, and your Resonance capacity. They are not rare, exactly, but backtracking to farm them is far more tedious than grabbing them as you walk past.
Spend Animus early, you’ll fill the tree anyway
Good news for anyone who freezes up in front of a skill tree. Lunarium’s is fully completable well before the credits, so there is no build here you can permanently ruin.
Spend as you earn. I would push toward projectile deflection and the perfect dodge upgrades first, since both of them make the mid game bosses noticeably less mean.
One thing worth flagging: you unlock four active skills but can only have one equipped at a time. Swap them per boss instead of picking a favorite and forgetting that menu exists.
Cloaks change how you play, not just how you look
Cloaks are the closest thing Lunarium has to armor sets, and they do more than nudge your stats around. Each one carries its own ability and can change how Ave moves.
One rewards you for chaining hits without taking damage, which is glorious once your parry is reliable and miserable before that point. Another scales your health off how much embroidery you have equipped, and that is the one I would hand to a first time player without hesitating.
Come back to the aggressive cloaks once you have a couple of bosses under your belt. Switching costs you nothing, so there is no reason to marry the first one you find.
Embroidery is where the build actually lives
Every cloak carries four embroidery slots, and there are more than two dozen passive charms to craft across the game. This is the real customization layer, not the cloak itself.
The trap is spreading thin. One damage charm, one healing charm, one Resonance charm and a spare, and now you are mediocre at everything instead of frightening at one thing.
Pick a plan and give it all four slots. Nothing is permanent, so tear it down and rebuild the moment a boss walls you.
Set up the Sanctuary sooner than you think
Lune’s Sanctuary is your hub, and it is very easy to treat as a place you pass through on the way to something more interesting. It is not that.
The Loom handles cloak upgrades and the Fungal Mortar makes dyes, which sounds purely cosmetic until you clock that the Loom is quietly gating your entire power curve. Build both as soon as you have the materials for them.
Explore sideways, and come back later
Lunarium hides things absolutely everywhere. Optional bosses, extra embroidery, NPCs tucked behind a wall you assumed was background art, all of it goes to the player who checks the corner instead of walking straight at the objective.
Traversal abilities you pick up later also open shortcuts in regions you thought you were finished with. Cyanstone in particular is worth a second sweep once your kit fills out.
And dying costs you nothing here. There is no currency loss on death, boss checkpoints sit right outside the arena, so throwing yourself at an optional fight you probably cannot win yet is basically free information.
Bonus: there are two endings
Without going anywhere near spoilers, your choices shape which of the two endings you land on. If you are the sort of person who plays a twenty hour game once and moves on, be a little deliberate about how you treat Lune along the way.
The verdict on getting started
Lunarium is generous about failure and strict about attention. Deaths are cheap, runbacks are short, and almost every loss traces back to a pattern you had not learned yet rather than something unfair.
That combination will not suit everyone. If parry timing makes your palms sweat and you would rather out level a problem than solve it, this is a rough fit, because there is no leveling here to hide behind.
But if the best part of Sekiro was the moment a boss stopped being noise and started being music, Ave and Lune have about twenty hours of that waiting for you. Learn the parry in the first region and the rest of the game opens up like a door.
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Screenshots are from the Lunarium page on Steam and used under Fair Use.