LUMA 光 · Story bible
The world, the people and the journey of LUMA, as an art book. The main pages are free of spoilers; the ending waits, folded shut, at the very bottom.
A real Japan of 1868 and a dreamed architecture: everything Neri touches existed; only the towers are larger than anyone ever dared.
Japan at the close of the Edo period. Wood, washi, bronze, rope and lacquer; ferries, travelling chests, oil lanterns. Nothing electric, nothing of steel, nothing that did not exist in 1868. Black ships have been seen on the horizon, and everyone feels that something is about to change.
For as long as anyone remembers, lantern keepers climbed the towers every evening and lit the lamp at the top. The lights held the towers awake and joined them to one another, garden to garden, island to island.
One night the lanterns went out, one after another, until the whole sky was dark. The paths shifted, the bells fell quiet, and the world fell asleep. Nobody knows who put them out. Not yet.
Only the architecture is a dream. Towers stand on rock needles above a sea of cloud, waterfalls pour into mist, gates float on islands. Ten storeys in spring, nearly a hundred at the end. Gravity is honest; the scale is not.
The wall becomes a stair. Every wall in LUMA is stone and washi with visible seams. Neri pulls a seam, and the wall opens step by step like a pop-up page, into a stair, a bridge, a balcony. It is the one verb of the game.
Every fold Neri used leaves a thin seam of gold when it rolls back, the way broken pottery is mended with gold. When she lights a tower, the light runs down exactly those seams. No two players leave the same tower behind.
Hana kept the lanterns. On the night they went out she gave her own to her daughter and went up the highest stair. Neri has had one clue ever since: her mother went up.
Character sheets in the style of the game. Nobody gives speeches; everyone changes the space around them.
Twelve, alone, and climbing because her mother went up.
A small red-gold dog who always seems to be one tower ahead.
She gave her lantern away and climbed into the mist.
A lantern keeper who could not bear the waiting.
Men of 1868 who still walk their rounds, though the lights are out.
Turns the light so it falls where it is needed.
An oar taller than she is, and an eye for every current.
Always one turn of the path ahead, as if he already knew.
He opens and closes ways from his side of the wall.
Silver-white hair and a robe of ice crystals.
Small white spirits of the bamboo groves.
Folded from ivory paper, edged with gold.
Four seasons, seven regions, one year. Themes and moods, not puzzle solutions.
Morning light on cherry gardens and mint-green roofs. Neri climbs alone, counting, talking to the flame. She lights the first towers and feels for the first time how high the world is. Again and again a small dog stands on a tower above her, looking down, and is gone by the time she arrives.
Rain on lotus ponds, tides in the canals, cicadas and fireflies. Mochi has come down to Neri at last, and she ties a scarf cut from her mother's cloth around his neck. Two now, and everything is warmer, and therefore everything can be lost. Sumi steps out of the distance, and the fox-mask boy's trust is tested on the summer shrine.
A sky-pirate ship carries Neri and Mochi over the cloud sea. On the other side: a water city of lotus, willows and stone bridges, built in rings, its markets and locks rising and falling with the water. The world is larger than her grief.
Dark courtyards under heavy tile roofs, wet granite, very few lanterns. Here only what sounds or glows matters. A great bronze bell, warm floors over firelit cellars, paper doors that show the shadow standing behind them. A chapter about listening.
Neri comes home and the land is divided. Banners on every wall, broken roads, villagers frozen in ink-sleep. Neri never fights. The war is there, in the distance, and she finds another way: she carries people to safety, sends rice up to cut-off villages and lowers the bridges between two clans. Every act ends in a connection, never a victory.
Snow, frozen waterfalls, silver-blue shadows and a shrine on the summit. Cold makes every fold hold until warmth lets it go. The towers reach ninety storeys, and Sumi follows Neri through the snow. A winter about warmth that is shared, not kept.
In a winter night Neri dreams of the land the strangers come from: a harbour of brick and timber, a lighthouse, a paddle steamer, and every step echoing once more behind her. A dream, and a glimpse of what lies beyond Japan.
A turquoise light on the horizon, black ships in the mist. Turquoise appears nowhere else in LUMA: it belongs to the strangers. Where it leads, the journey of LUMA I ends and LUMA II begins.
Hana's flame. It reveals hidden seams, holds a fold when hung on a hook, and grows a new brass ring at the end of every chapter.
Neri counts because counting keeps time in order. Steps are the measure of everything she does.
Long, light and always moving. It shows the wind, and the wind is information.
Bells mean waking, finding and remembering. Silence means the opposite.
Warm accents of the lit world. Petrol and green answer them. Turquoise is reserved for the black ships.
The story is carried by camera, music, haptics and gestures. Text is short, and never mixed between languages.
Between two snow-covered stones on the summit Neri finds a pressed cherry blossom: Hana's. Hana will not come back. Neri understands that her mother never meant to bring the lights back. She meant to give them away.
In five acts Neri climbs to the roof of the shadow castle. At the top she does not turn the lantern against Sumi; she sets it at her feet. A golden crack runs through the white mask. Sumi was a lantern keeper like Hana who could not bear the waiting. For the first time she folds a stair, for Neri.
The last ink wave comes, and Mochi stands in front of Neri. He does not suffer: a glow, one last wag, and he becomes light. That light runs through every gold seam of every tower Neri ever folded and lights them all at once. From then on a small warm light follows her, and when she stops, it sits down beside her. The game never comments on it.
Neri and Mochi's light follow the turquoise light across the sea. The black ship lands in the fog. Last image: a stone bridge over the Thames, London around 1872, gas lamps in the mist, a great clock tower. Neri sets her lantern on the parapet; the small light sits beside it; a gas lamp at the far end flickers turquoise. After a hundred storeys upward, LUMA I ends level with the world. Black. LUMA II. Then: For Mochi.
Story, characters and world by Nami Shams. Character sheets and region looks are art direction for the game, not in-game captures.