Let's talk a bit about Luna Abyss

This is not a review of Luna Abyss, and the text reflects the writer's own views and not necessarily Gamereactor's official stance.

Game Pass. There are now many different opinions about Xbox's subscription service, but for me, it has been a perfect source of games for several years, games I wouldn't normally have bought. Luna Abyss is one of the games I've discovered via Game Pass, and in my opinion, it's one of the most criminally overlooked games of this summer.

Somehow, Luna Abyss managed to fly under the radar (at least my radar), and that's probably because there hasn't been much buzz about it, either from the publisher or the press. The game currently boasts an impressive score of 81 on Metacritic, which is higher than Moss: The Forgotten Relic, the same as Halo: Campaign Evolved, and just a single point below Splatoon Raiders.

Luna Abyss comes from Kwalee Games and is a brutal, intense first-person shooter that blends games like Doom and Returnal with a touch of NieR: Automata, and the result is an action-packed sci-fi cocktail. You take on the role of Fawkes, a female prisoner sentenced to 10,000 days in a prison on the artificial moon Luna. However, she can have her sentence reduced over time if she undertakes a series of tasks for "The All-Father", in which she must explore abandoned colonies and recover ancient technology.

It all takes place within a vast, abandoned megastructure on the moon Luna, and it becomes clear almost immediately that something is terribly wrong here. Accompanying you on the missions is the prison AI, Aylin, who monitors your every move, and who one moment seems like your friend, and the next the exact opposite. At the same time, strange voices from the "Abyss" begin to speak to Fawkes, and she starts to realise her role is far greater than simply being a prisoner on Luna.

Luna Abyss is one of the most visually well-designed games so far in 2026. It all takes place in vast industrial areas and spaces characterised by great verticality, alien technology, and marvellous brutalist architecture. The further Fawkes descends through these almost Gothic structures, the more a story unfolds of a lost civilisation that was engulfed by a catastrophe known as The Scourge.

There are long stretches where you move almost in silence through these surroundings, which are at once cold yet, in their own unique way, beautiful. There are longer platforming sequences where you simply move from area-to-area, jumping from platform-to-platform. Fawkes is able to fall from very high platforms without taking any damage, so you plunge down through large pipes and from great heights, and it looks visually impressive. In these sequences, you can really appreciate the fantastic brutalist architecture combined with stunning lighting and structures you've never seen before.

Shortly after these calm and almost meditative parkour/platforming sequences, you're attacked by enemies and the game instantly shifts to a bullet hell shooter. Now you must keep moving constantly, dodge the enemies' swarms and patterns of projectiles, and time your attacks to survive. Some enemies have shields that must first be destroyed with specific weapons, so there's a layer of tactics to the combat here.

The same applies when enemies reach a stage just before they're destroyed, where you can choose either to absorb the remnants of their energy or use this remaining energy to deal a small amount of damage to surrounding enemies. It's all spiced up with some brutal boss battles, where you really have to use your weapons wisely if you're to stand any chance of surviving. And suddenly, it's completely quiet again. The two extremes in the game - the frantic bullet hell battles and the utterly quiet platforming sequences - stand in a beautiful and effective contrast to one another.

Luna Abyss is a typical AA release. This means not everything is perfectly polished and seamless. There are rough edges here and there, and there are platforming sequences towards the end of the game that demand such high precision the clunky controls fall short, which can be frustrating. In addition, there are also some on-rails transport sequences that just seem rather pointless and mostly serve as odd filler.

I played Luna Abyss on the Xbox Series X, and the graphics were quite blurry. I don't think this is a deliberate artistic choice on the part of the developers, but I believe the focus has been on a smooth frame rate and plenty of visual effects, so the developers have been forced to run the game at a fairly low native resolution and then upscaling everything to a higher resolution on screen. You can see this happening, especially if the internal resolution is quite low, as various upscalers then struggle to keep up, though this will likely be different on the PC version, which I haven't had the chance to check out.

Luna Abyss was a massive positive surprise for me. I was annoyed throughout by the blurry graphics, which are impossible to overlook, but even so, the game kept me hooked and I was drawn into its unique brutalist world, the frantic battles, and simply the whole game's bleak and heavy atmosphere.

Luna Abyss is quite different from other games we're seeing at the moment. It's linear, it's easy to get into, and it offers some of the most polished visual design of the year and the most frantic combat we've seen since... well, Returnal - without by any means having the same level of difficulty - though you can have that if you want it.

So if you have Game Pass on either Xbox or PC, my recommendation is you check out Luna Abyss, if you haven't already. For me, it's the big positive surprise of the summer, despite all the AA rough edges, and you can complete it in 8-9 hours.