A Piece of the Puzzle: What is Claire de Lune?

Hey all,

One of the questions we've been asked several times in recent days, is what is Claire de Lune? While that's a fairly open-ended question, it's also a fair one. A synopsis for any game only provides a glimpse of what it entails, and while our Steam store page has had a makeover, it still doesn't paint the whole picture.

As our trailer shows, in Claire de Lune you play as John, a smuggler on the run with his daughter, Claire. After crash landing on a foreign planet, John and Claire are separated. It'll be down to you - and your trusty nanogun - to find Claire, repair the ship, and escape safely.

Games like Portal and The Talos Principle are story-driven first person puzzle games. Heavy on puzzles (as you might expect), with diverse challenges to overcome, wrapped in a rich narrative that propels the player forwards.

We wanted to tap into this but expand on it in our own way, using our years of development experience as a valuable starting point, to tell our own story.

In games such as Portal, you’re a test subject - a theme often used in puzzle environments. This tends to be an intentional design decision, as it allows the play space to be controlled environment (to justify why all the doors are locked, for example).

Where Claire de Lune is concerned, we wanted to not only be based in reality, but remove many of these artificial barriers to open up the environment.

We also wanted our opening puzzles in Claire de Lune to be both accessible and traditional, such as finding a wrench to open a locked door. In some respects, your interactions with items and the world around you will feel reminiscent of old school point-and-click adventure games such as The Dig or Monkey Island, as John will often describe objects and the items you interact with.

The scope and difficulty of puzzles, however, won’t always be this simple, and as you progress through the game - accompanied by your quick-witted AI Arturo - they shift in scale as you begin to not only utilize the nanogun, but delve deeper into the game's storyline.

Our intention behind our more challenging puzzles is to make you feel like you’re actually solving an underlying problem. Whether it’s code based puzzles that actually use assembly code, or a logic gate puzzle with - you guessed it - actual logic gates. We want you to feel like you’re physically involved in the solution.

Lastly, and one of favorite things about Claire de Lune, and a thread that runs throughout the game, is our approach to cohesion. For example, if you look closely at a computer screen you'll see a topographical layout of the area, with dots dispatching where you landed. There’ll also be a little summary of which personnel were sent to check out the crash landing, with accurate time stamps.

These little additions and a focus on fine detail litter the game. We'll let you search for them :)

Tactic Studios