I had never heard of Luna Abyss before it arrived in my hands, and I think that is, improbably, the ideal way to experience it. Kwalee Labs, the Manchester-based studio formerly known as Bonsai Collective, spent seven years building a first-person bullet hell shooter inside a brutalist megastructure on a mimic moon, and the result is one of the stranger, more confident debut games I have played in a long time.
Key Details
- Release Date: May 21, 2026
- Developer: Kwalee Labs
- Publisher: Kwalee
- Price: [TBC]
- Platforms: PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Game Pass
- Review Code Provided: Yes, for PC
A Prison Sentence Worth Serving
You are Fawkes, a prisoner sentenced to 9,000 days on Luna for the crime of being born with red eyes. Your warden is Aylin. They are an AI overseer whose helpfulness has an unsettling quality, as though she has read every manual on human interaction and understood none of it.
She sends you on missions into the Abyss below the colony of Greymont, a civilization that collapsed in ways the game reveals slowly, through environment and encounter rather than exposition. Nobody sits you down and explains the Scourge or the All-Father or the Collective. You piece it together the way Fawkes does, in real time, stumbling through corridors you were never supposed to survive.
The world draws openly from Tsutomu Nihei’s manga Blame!, a debt Art Director Harry Corr has confirmed directly, and it shows most clearly in the opening level, all incomprehensible brutalist scale, pipes, grated floors, and darkness with red light bleeding through every gap. But Luna Abyss earns its visual identity rather than merely borrowing it.
A later outdoor section opens into a pale blue sky above crimson trees and frost-covered ground, and the contrast is genuinely startling after hours underground. The environments are detailed and varied enough that I found myself slowing down repeatedly just to look, which is an unusual impulse in a game that is actively trying to kill you.
The Part Where Everything Clicks
The combat is built around a single elegant idea: guns don’t run out of ammunition; they overheat. You switch weapons constantly, not to manage resources but to manage heat, and since each weapon also serves a tactical function, the shotgun that breaks blue enemy shields, the sniper that handles purple ones, every encounter becomes a rapid and specific problem to solve.
Comparisons to Returnal or Saros are inevitable and not entirely unfair. All three games drop you into a hostile sci-fi world and bury you in bullet patterns, but Luna Abyss is a considerably more forgiving experience, at least until the bosses arrive.
A dedicated drain mechanic lets you siphon health directly from enemies by tapping F, or detonate them entirely by holding it, which means mob encounters on Warden difficulty, the third tier, rarely threaten you unless you are genuinely not paying attention. For players who find Returnal’s brutality a barrier, Luna Abyss is a more welcoming entry point into the genre.
Against bosses, though, the contract changes entirely. The Tortured Adrift, the first major boss, fills the arena with spiraling purple and red orbs in patterns that feel genuinely choreographed, like a shmup designer was let loose inside a first-person shooter and nobody stopped them.
I died several times and did not mind once. The boss voice acting, too, is delivered with a theatrical commitment that smaller NPC encounters never quite match, and the gap between the two is noticeable.
Three Hours of Hype
The problem is that it takes roughly three hours to reach that moment. Luna Abyss parcels out basic movement tools, the dash, the double jump, the slide, as chest rewards across early missions, which means the opening stretch runs at a deliberately reduced tempo while you collect the kit you need.
The logic is sound: by the time you face the Tortured Adrift you have everything, and you know how to use it. But the journey drags in a way that a tighter early game could have avoided. Regular enemies in those opening hours lack the intensity the bosses promise, and the difficulty gap between the two never fully closes, even once your toolkit is complete.
The auto lock-on mechanic, enabled by default on mouse and keyboard, compounds this: it smooths out combat in a way that makes the early encounters feel even more routine than they perhaps intend to be.
Voice acting across the broader cast is uneven. Some characters land exactly right, but others feel underdeveloped, and despite everything the game does to build atmosphere around Fawkes, I have not yet found myself particularly invested in them, which is a meaningful gap in a game this reliant on its narrative pull.
Final Score: 8.5/10
Luna Abyss is a debut from a sub-twenty-person team that took seven years to make something genuinely unusual, and the ambition pays off far more often than it falters. It knows exactly what kind of uncomfortable, disorienting experience it wants to be, and it commits to that without apology. The world is worth exploring, the boss encounters are worth every death, and the visual craft throughout is remarkable for a studio of this size.
It just asks you to be patient with it first.
**Bonus Action was provided with a PC code of Luna Abyss for the purpose of this review**
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