About
A small shelf, tended slowly.
Luminvante is one person collecting the quiet phone games that get lost under the loud ones, and writing them up the way you would tell a friend.
How it started
In January 2023 I was riding the 55 down Saint-Laurent in the dark at half past four, the way you do in a Montreal winter, and I realised I had just deleted my fourth mobile game in a month. Every one of them wanted a daily login, an energy meter, a nudge to spend. None of them were restful. I wanted the opposite: a game that would sit quietly in my pocket and ask for nothing.
I went looking, found a few genuinely lovely ones, and kept a note in my phone. That note grew. By the spring it had turned into Luminvante, named after nothing in particular, chosen because it sounded like a warm light left on for you.
Who tends it
My name is Delphine Aubry. I live in the Mile End, I test everything on a Pixel that is a couple of years past its prime, and I have no studio behind me and no partnerships to protect. That last part matters. Nobody pays to appear on this shelf, because there is no way to pay. When I say a game has a rough edge, it is because it does.
I read game credits the way some people read liner notes, so the write-ups here lean into the makers: who built the thing, where, and why. A solo developer drawing bunnies in Krita and a venture-backed wellbeing studio in Melbourne are making very different objects, and I think that context helps you choose.
What this is not
Luminvante is not a store, a launcher, or an affiliate. I do not host any game files, and every button here sends you to the official Google Play or App Store page. I do not run ads. I do not chase every new release, and I am not trying to review the whole platform. This is a shelf, not a warehouse.
The one honest caveat
I update this roughly every couple of weeks, when the winter light and a free evening line up. I am one person, not a newsroom. So a mobile port can quietly ship before I have had time to play it properly and add it, and a game already here can change under me between visits. If something looks out of date, it probably is, and a short email will usually fix it faster than you would think.