Explore a vast industrial hulk with your trusty climbing axes in this eerie first person platformer

Lorn protagonist clinging to wall like spiderman on left with industrial backdrop

(Image credit: Rubeki)

Lorn's Lure, an upcoming indie from solo developer Rubeki, instantly hooked me with its free demo on Steam. This first person plstformer has you playing an android exploring the vast, industrial ruins of a lost civilization, pursuing some manner of biblically accurate angel-come-glitch in reality through the impossibly ancient rusted hulk.

Playing Lorn's Lure reminded me of last year's fantastic Scorn in a weird way⁠—it's a vastly different gameplay experience and things are certainly more low-fi and less icky than with Scorn, but these unnerving apocalyptic vistas are still familiar—the Lorn's Lure demo level made me feel like I was crawling through the innards of some colossal beast in the same way Scorn did. It's great stuff, bolstered by an eerie ambient soundtrack.

The central pillar of Lorn's Lure's first person platforming is a pair of climbing axes, and they enable a stamina-limited climbing system reminiscent of Breath of the Wild or Shadow of the Colossus. Lorn's Lure presents this vast, vertical level without a clear path forward, and it's up to you to pick your way across climbable and non-climbable surfaces, finding your own way to the exit.

That sense of puzzle solving and pathfinding is crucial to Lorn's Lure's core loop, but I really appreciate that Rubeki included opt-in waypoint hints. If you're ever lost, you can activate a compass point leading you in the right direction for a brief duration. It's deliberately limited though, just nudging you from one set piece to the next, but that's part of the appeal to me: it's a perfect midpoint between an always-on Skyrim GPS constantly holding your hand and some more unfriendly retro experiences like the older Jedi Knight games, where it could feel like I was never not lost.

This free demo also contains a hidden level unlocked by discovering all of the hidden collectibles in the base map, and the full game promises to be a rich, engrossing, and atmospheric platforming experience. Lorn's Lure currently has no set release date, but you can check out the demo yourself and wishlist it on Steam, while creator Rubeki is active on Twitter and Patreon.

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Lorn's primary climbing axes embedded in a rock next to a dead body with fungus growing out of it — (Image credit: Rubeki)

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.