Lenrual Review – Look To The Stars

Lenrual by Jonathan Guite

I’m going to skip the preamble for once and get right to the point: Lenrual is one of the most initially confusing games I’ve ever played.

Seemingly a first-person puzzle game, it begins with an incredibly brief tutorial showing you that you’re going to be tracing patterns with your keyboard and that you’re able to dash with the space bar. After that? You’re dumped into what appears to be a city with a sprawling nightlife of people in cloaks and masks who speak in light patterns.

What’s your goal? That’s for you to figure out. How do you accomplish it? Also for you to figure out. Sound confusing? Good, because it is.

The Wreckage of Stars

Despite its simple tutorial, Lenrual is deeply inscrutable, in the way that most deeply personal art is. There are themes present throughout that I think I took away from it, but at the same time, could easily have just been what I brought into it myself.

Like, I think it has things to say about the power of community, about the experience of being in an unfamiliar environment, and about the value of art in our lives. But again, I could be completely wrong.

These are all things that came to me as I stumbled around its ethereal, pretty environments and interacted with all manner of weird things I didn’t understand. I cannot stress enough that this game does not hold your hand in the slightest. It expects you to get lost, to miss things, and to start over once certain events have passed and you can’t seem to advance.

Eventually, I started to piece some things together, things that I’m not going to explain here because I’d be ruining the entire point of the game. I will say that more than once, I was reminded of The Witness, both in terms of the gameplay and also the game’s ethos.

It’s also worth noting that the mystery is largely the point of Lenrual as a whole. Once you’ve figured things out, the game itself is quite short and won’t hold much replay value. Heck, the developer openly states on the Steam page that their record for speedrunning it is 48 seconds.

The Verdict

At this point, hopefully I’ve helped you figure out if Lenrual is for you or not. It honestly took me a while to figure out if it was for me or not. If you’re expecting something easily digestible and replayable, save your five dollars.

However, if you’re interested in an interactive art piece that feels both deeply personal and meticulously designed, go for it. I guarantee you haven’t played anything else like it.

As it stands, few games have managed to make me feel this dumb, but ultimately also this brilliant, in a long time. I don’t know if I’ll play Lenrual again, but I’ll definitely remember it. Ultimately, I think that’s the most important thing art can do: leave an impression.

Lenrual is available via Steam.

Watch the trailer for Lenrual below:

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