Lamunation! Review - It's A Mad And Brilliantly Shining World

Sunday, December 11, 2022

Genre - Comedy. Play Time - 15 hours. Developer - WhitePowder. Steam VNDB

Always Be Happy!

Most visual novels use comedy in some form, be it a joke to break tension or a scene to make the player empathise with the characters, but few commit to it as the single focus of their identity. This is for a good reason, humour is subjective and as such making a comedy game with a wide appeal is a difficult feat. Lamunation comes along and says ‘but what if we just double down on our style, twice the intensity should mean twice the appeal’. It makes for quite a strong statement of uncompromising vision and it is this which will either enrapture you or turn you off the experience. However, does this gambit really work to draw you into its humour laden world? Let’s find out.

My only question is... Why?

So I Hear You Like Ramune – Narrative and Themes

Lamunation has a surprisingly diverse set of narrative tools and tricks to break up its comedy into manageable chucks while offering something substantial to chew on. This a game which knows how to lean into the emotions it draws out through its humour and utilises them to create a bond between player and characters. However, this approach is not without its issues and these force a strange balancing act with the game’s writing.

When a game opens with the cast skydiving with no safety equipment just to get the perfect photo you know what sort of experience you are in for. Setting the tone for the type of humour the player will be presented with and acclimatising them to this content is one of Lamunation’s greatest strengths. While it opens with a bang there is a concerted effort to make sure that future jokes and events have some basis in what has come before, and in doing so establish the boundaries of this humour within the player’s mind. This is cleverly used with a selection of delayed pay offs to keep earlier moments of the narrative in the front of your mind in a manner that does not detract from your enjoyment of the immediate joke or scene. These work in tandem to ensure a coherency throughout the entire game which is surprising given how off the rails it gets.

Know where your nearest bathroom is kids.

As for Lamunation’s particular brand of humour itself, it sits in the Pop Team Epic end of the spectrum rather than the more traditional Slice of Life humour found many other visual novels. What this means in practice is a parade of increasing improbable and elaborate situations which serve as the focal point of whatever joke is being made and it is interested in having its characters be both the straight man and the advocate of this madness, often at the same time. However, it never reaches the disconnected segments which define Pop Team Epic and instead structures them along character route lines with certain through themes for each which are a constant presence for the player to latch onto. As such this is a particular friendly example of this type of humour for newcomers, it never ventures into complete nonsense and meets them halfway by offering a familiar route based core so its tendrils of humour can wrap around you.

If there is one noticeable weakness to the narrative of Lamunation it is the lack of a plot centric driving force, outside of Corona’s route, to propel the player and keep them hooked. There are forces at play in each route to keep the narrative going but they lack any overall direction and are only relevant in that single moment. It is hardly a unique feature of Lamunation as many other visual novels use similar techniques, but it is a problem here due to its combination with the focus on humour. As you might imagine this can lead to the story feeling like a string of jokes which are going nowhere in the grand scheme of the game. Thankfully this is only something which comes to the front in retrospect after a route has been completed, but it does hurt player retention since it might make them feel as if there is no point to playing another route since they have seen all it has to offer. A stronger foreshadowing and focus on building up Corona’s route would have gone a long way to alleviating this issue and it is a shame the developers did not choose to play up an overarching narrative.

The entire cast romance is certainly a distinctive recurring gag.

While the character routes might lack a strong plot through line they make up for with the focus on making each scene as memorable as the last with a gradual escalation in their quality. Lamunation understanding how to get the most out of every single screen of the game and milk it for as much humour as possible. It manages to make sure that this constant barrage of new content is not overwhelming by ensuring it never puts two events which are too different next to each other, which help to provide a sense of progress and continuity to what would otherwise be a seemingly random series of encounters. Helping this along is the core of most visual novel routes, a focus on a small subset of the cast. This trick is especially effective in Lamunation as it gives it an otherwise absent bedrock for the player to identify with and invested in. In combination, these traits create an extremely impactful experience in the moment supporting the humour at the core of the game’s presentation.

The one exception to most of what has been talked about above is Corona’s route. This is the only route which has a focus on a plot and it acts as a finale to all of the ideas and character beats present throughout the rest of the game. Given the complete absence of plot up to this point, Corona’s route is exceptionally strong as it plays on how the humour and narrative have been previously been set up to both throw a curve ball into the mix and add a new level to every event before this point. Each joke comes full circle and each character arc is moved to a suitable conclusion with the structure helping to tie the entire tale into a nice knot. It is a strange choice to have such a strong sense of narrative momentum only be contained within the effective final act of the story, but this is one hell of a bang to go out on and well worth all the time spent to get to it.

Bring Smiles To Their Faces – Characters

Lamunation is a highly character focused visual novel and without its strong cast the humour would not be able to land properly. Their banter and bonds serve as the basis of everything which happens in the game, so it is a good thing that they are utilised to their fullest extent by placing them in strange circumstances and having them react appropriately.

Every member of the cast stands out in their own unique manner

There has been a concerted effort by the developer to keep the cast number down with most scenes involving a handful of the five main characters and maybe an occasional side character popping up. Each of their conversations mixes small glimpses of their various personalities with the humour in an organic manner by ensuring the lens of a scene never extends beyond that small group of characters. This enables an intimacy with them which the game can leverage to make sure you are laughing along with their antics as if you were part of the group yourself. The effect of this angle is that the strong and distinctive personalities of the cast are put front and centre as the main pole around which the humour can dance and bring the madness of proceedings into a more relatable format for a wider audience. Such an empathsis on characters is the corner stone on which Lamunation is based.

However, a small cast comes with its own problems. This focus comes at the cost of limiting the space for character interactions and the game runs the constant risk of the conversations becoming overly familiar. Having to regularly reuse their pool of character dynamics does provide the desired familiarity but it also breeds a contempt and desire for something new to be thrown into the mix. There are only so many times a pair of characters can play out their similar conversations before it becomes boring and the player loses interest. Thankfully Lamunation does introduce enough to stave off the worst effects of this weakness with imaginative new situations for the characters to act out their interactions in. Nonetheless, it always hangs uncomfortably over every scene and could easily be the thing which makes a player put the game down if they are not quite jiving with the jokes.

Being naked is a big part of Luna's role in the game...

Brilliant Moments in Bright Tones -Visual, Audio and Technical

Everything about the visual and audio of Lamunation pops with a vigorous and upbeat energy which is infectious in its aggressive positivity. The art style’s sole focus is making the humour and character moments have as much impact on the senses as possible. In order to achieve this it liberally utilises a strong light colour pallet and exaggerated character poses and features which shift and change to suit the needs of the scene. The music follows a similar vein with cheerful tunes that are designed to invoke the feel good vibe at the core of the game’s thematics. These songs lean heavily into synthesiser sounds and this lends a near future feeling to the setting while assisting in detaching Lamunation for the expectations of a realistic narrative. However, both sound and imagery suffer from a common problem in that they can feel somewhat standard at times. Most Slice of Life visual novels lean into similar aesthetic and musical choices for different reasons but the result for Lamunation is the sense that it is just another in a long line of such titles. It never escapes from this feeling over its play time and this is a shame as the visuals and audio are by no means of poor quality.

On the technical front Lamunation falls within the standard for the visual novel industry with all the features players have come to expect. It does differentiate itself in a few key way which stem from its understanding of the medium and its desire to surprise the player as much as possible. The game’s most notable trick is its inclusion of semi-regular short videos interjected at key points or funny moments. These increase the impact of the associated moments through the sudden juxtaposition of the relatively static nature of visual novels with they more movement centric one of videos. Through their selective use the game can keep the player guessing as to when they will appear to both keep them on their toes and provide an extra bit of chaos to the humour and narrative elements. More generally there is a keen eye for utilising the systems of visual novels in expressive ways such as abnormal placement of character portraits on screen as well as their proximity to each other.

The little video intros for each character are quite effective

If Lamunation missteps in any serious way it is in the failure to lock Corona’s route behind the completion of the other two. This is a problem because as mentioned before Corona’s route acts as the finale to the game and wraps up all the previous routes, meaning that it simultaneously spoils those routes and references events which it expects you to already know while providing no context. It is truly baffling why the developers would think it is acceptable for an unsuspecting new player to be allowed to accidentally choose a route which could potential ruin their overall enjoyment of the game. Of course if you know about this fact it is easy to plan your playthrough around it, hence why it has been brought up here, but this is not an issue the player should ever have to consider in the first place.