When you mention FromSoftware, everyone automatically jumps to Dark Souls, or maybe Elden Ring now, given how monstrously popular that game was. However, before they started Soulslikes, they made a variety of other games. While I’d love to turn this into an article about Lost Kingdoms, I’ve yet to find an indie game that properly draws inspiration from it. Instead, this is about a game called Lunacid, which is very heavily inspired by King’s Field, a series of dungeon-crawling action RPGs that FromSoftware made all the way back in 1994.
Lunacid is as close to a modern-day King’s Field game as you can get. It’s set in a world where a gigantic beast came from the sea and covered the Earth in a poison fog, and now everything’s basically gone to poop. As a result of this, anyone who’s even slightly off gets chucked into The Great Well, and that’s where you come in, as the story starts with you being thrown in.
From here, you get to choose a class, then you walk around in first-person and explore the Great Well, always working your way down, and fighting off strange beasts and monsters on the way. It’s important to note that, while you do a fair bit of fighting in Lunacid, it’s not really the focus.
The focus here is on exploration, wonder, and some incredibly cool moments. Your class will dictate a little bit about how you fight, but the basics are you walk in, hit something, walk away before you get hit. You get some cool spells along the way too, but you have to be careful when using them as they require time to charge for the most part.
The game even tracks the real-world luna phases for some its mechanics, and that’s the kind of cool that old-school games could never manage. So, if you want to try out an old FromSoftware game, but want it to have some modern sensibilities, then please do yourself a favour and jump into Lunacid.
