Lumo is steeped in the nerdish romance of the British 1980s video game development scene. For those who lived through those days, this wistful isometric puzzler, an ode to John Ritman's 1987 game Head Over Heels, is a reminder of mornings spent in the computer room at school, when kids competed for a seat at a BBC Micro.
Lumo calls to mind old exercise books, heavy with pencil-drawn maps of computer game layouts (indeed, the maps you unlock of each of its dungeon's floors are scribbled in just such a book). It's the kind of adventure that had to be snatched before dinner, when the only prayer on your lips was that the cassette would load the first time.
Lumo is the Finnish word for 'enchantment'. It's a reference to the protagonist, a dinky magician who totters about beneath the floppy brim of an oversized mage's hat. But it's also a reference to the spell under which any veteran of this forgotten genre will surely fall.
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