The Luminous Underground
Choice of Games · 2020 · Casual, RPG, Action, Choose Your Own Adventure, Adventure
PC
Mostly Positive73% · 11
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About The Luminous Underground
Blast spirits out of a haunted subway system! Can your team defeat rival exterminators, shoddy gear, and City Hall?
You've been a daemon dissipator for years, carrying a rainbow blaster and learning the ins and outs of magic to zap electromagnetic monsters into static. After following the jobs from one end of Septenland to the other, you've settled down here in Barrington: an old city. A weird city. A city boiling with spirits, specters, and daemons. It's the perfect place to start a company of your own.
The Luminous Underground is a 660,000-word interactive secondary-world science fantasy novel by Phoebe Barton, where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Your team is just you and McCowan, your friend and business partner, but it's hard for two people to run an operation like this. When you applied for a contract with the Barrington Transit Commission, you didn't expect anything but a flat rejection. But you got it! And now you've got to find more teammates, sharpen your skills, and put a dent in the spirit population while staying well clear of the electrified rail.
But you'll find that Barrington's underground is much more than its tunnels. There's a forest down here, teeming with crystalline trees that glitter under your flashlight. There's a portal to the Vitalscape, a super-luminous alternative realm of being. You can enter it through a mural, but you'll need a crystal tuning fork to get back. There are giants, robots, daemons, and even a giant robot daemon.
Of course, corruption and mismanagement festers down here. Is this all part of your competitors’ attempts to secure the subway contract for their own? Is City Hall's stingy maintenance budget to blame? How much can you get paid not to fix this problem?
Are you ready to patrol your patch of subway, or will you stand by and let it crumble?
Strange things are crawling out of the subway. Someone better call you.
You've been a daemon dissipator for years, carrying a rainbow blaster and learning the ins and outs of magic to zap electromagnetic monsters into static. After following the jobs from one end of Septenland to the other, you've settled down here in Barrington: an old city. A weird city. A city boiling with spirits, specters, and daemons. It's the perfect place to start a company of your own.
The Luminous Underground is a 660,000-word interactive secondary-world science fantasy novel by Phoebe Barton, where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Your team is just you and McCowan, your friend and business partner, but it's hard for two people to run an operation like this. When you applied for a contract with the Barrington Transit Commission, you didn't expect anything but a flat rejection. But you got it! And now you've got to find more teammates, sharpen your skills, and put a dent in the spirit population while staying well clear of the electrified rail.
But you'll find that Barrington's underground is much more than its tunnels. There's a forest down here, teeming with crystalline trees that glitter under your flashlight. There's a portal to the Vitalscape, a super-luminous alternative realm of being. You can enter it through a mural, but you'll need a crystal tuning fork to get back. There are giants, robots, daemons, and even a giant robot daemon.
Of course, corruption and mismanagement festers down here. Is this all part of your competitors’ attempts to secure the subway contract for their own? Is City Hall's stingy maintenance budget to blame? How much can you get paid not to fix this problem?
Are you ready to patrol your patch of subway, or will you stand by and let it crumble?
- Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, aromantic, or asexual.
- Descend into a magic-drenched subway and face down spirits beneath the streets!
- Help time travelers integrate into the incredible world of today.
- Dig up megacorporate corruption while you dust off vacuum tubes.
- Investigate mysterious disappearances down in the underground.
- Cooperate with other outfits in town, or act on your own
- Lead the mayor to safety through a gauntlet of terrors!
- Save the lives of a missing crew under an impossible sky.
- Calm down a giant woman who's got you in the palm of her hand.
Strange things are crawling out of the subway. Someone better call you.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
I bought this cause it sounded like a fun ghostbusters-inspired text adventure. It's so dull, mind numbingly dull to the point where I was just skipping pages at a time to get to anything even remotely interesting.21 found this helpful
The first few chapters were interesting but boy did it get boring quickly afterwards. Out of around 30 text-based games I've played, this is the only one where I've started skipping filler texts and there were so many of them.11 found this helpful
With a first-play time for me just over 11 hours, The Luminous Underground provides more "gameplay" in read time than many of its graphical peers, while effortlessly blending decisions you could and couldn't control into the narrative of each page. I'll explore how much variance there can be in the story on my second playthrough, but shallow it is not, and I found my time spent satisfying. Of particular note is how well done the human interaction is. I suspect many situations were no-win, but people's reactions to different tacks in conversation felt real. Hit someone with an empty platitude when they're hurting and they get upset. Push someone past their limits, and you'll have to think hard about what motivates them to keep them together. There is no magic button for success, except, perhaps, whichever skill you trained the most. I put all my time into Luminosity, and when all you have is an esoteric light-based magic hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. But that's the point of training a skill, and in the instances where I couldn't apply it, I struggled accordingly. I look forward to my second playthrough, and I enjoyed the game.3 found this helpful
There are a whole lot of stats in this game. They don't do anything as far as I can tell, and it is unclear if and how anything you do affects anything else. It would be better to just read a book.2 found this helpful
love it
Good enough
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