Game of the Month: Lust for Darkness
Lust for Darkness was released this June, the first game by indie developer Movie Games Lunarium. (If you’ve started to notice that almost every game I play is either an indie game, a last-gen game, or a free demo, I point you sadly in the direction of my un-limitless bank account.) It retails at a very reasonable £10.99 on Steam, and like many indie outings on that platform, was Kickstarter funded. It’s a Lovecraft-inspired erotic psychological horror game - incidentally bringing my Game of the Month Somehow Featuring Cthulhu total up to 4 out of 4, and technically making 2018 the Cthulhuiest year since records began! It is also completely not safe for work or younger players; and should probably be avoided by those who are uncomfortable with graphic depictions of sex and nudity, or with implications or descriptions of off-screen sexual violence.
The elevator pitch for this game is one you’ve heard a million times if you’re a horror fan: Jonathan’s wife, Amanda, is kidnapped by a cult, and he has to go in like a one-man army to rescue her. It’s also enjoying something of a renaissance: 2017 alone provided us with two high-profile examples of this exact horror game trope via Resident Evil 7 and Outlast 2. It’s one of the commonest set-ups for horror, alongside the one where a man is responsible for his wife’s/daughter’s/sister’s manslaughter/murder, and must navigate a purgatory of his own making in order to atone. (I love them but I’ll be the first to admit that horror games have a bit of a female relative problem. Not to mention a purgatorial hell-maze problem.) And indeed, Lust for Darkness plays out along very similar lines, basically like an indie soft-porn reimagining of the second Outlast game.
It certainly has the benefit of brevity: it only took me five and a half hours to play through the whole story. Admittedly, I somehow missed about half of the optional backstory documents, but I also spent enough time getting lost and doubling back on myself that it probably all evens out. On the plus side this means that Lust for Darkness can be enjoyed in a single sitting if you just follow the objectives; but whether this represents good value for money is a matter of opinion. I personally was quite happy to support a new studio on their first game for this price, but if playtime is a factor in your spending choices it’s worth taking into account.
So, is it as erotic as promised? There’s an achievement for spending 10 minutes on the orgy scene near the beginning of the game, and I cannot for the life of me think how I didn’t manage to ping it. The sprites may not be the most well-realised from a graphics perspective (and I suspect having the attendees masked was as much about not having to animate their faces as adding to the mystique of the event), but most of what’s happening in this scene lives up to the billing of an erotic video game. Sure, public sex and the occasional threesome seems to be the limits to the devs’ “no holds barred” sexual imaginations, but everyone’s clearly enjoying themselves.
After that one scene, though, the sexy stuff takes a rapid turn for the disturbing, and never really comes back. The alien dimension of Lust’ghaa, where Jonathan gets transported various times during the game, is a squidgy, vaguely sexual horrorshow. Consisting of a series of sphincter-ish doorways to womb-like caves, where people have suffered sex-themed tortures like been penetrated and ripped apart ass-to-mouth by man-sized erections, it’s enough to really turn you off the whole “sex cult” thing. There’s one other human-driven orgy scene later in the game, but you will get caught and die if you stray close enough to take a look; so that’s basically your lot for actual eroticism, unless you have some very, very niche tastes. In fact, for a game that bills itself as erotica, this game takes a weirdly negative view of sexual pleasure, equating it entirely with selfishness, pain, and death.
A game with this much sexual content, especially when mixing it with horror tropes, is never going to meet everyone’s approval; and I dare say that something this ambitious with regards to producing erotic horror in a video game will probably leave everyone dissatisfied to an extent, either because they feel it goes too far or not far enough. So while I don’t blame the makers of the game for not matching my hopes for it 100%, I do want to comment briefly on what I feel are a couple of issues around female sexuality in the game. Firstly, female genitalia is obscured throughout, except for a few pieces of abstract artwork, despite the fact that there are penises just everywhere, doing everything from lying limply on the owner’s lap to penetrating a goat. (Is this really less shockingly explicit than full-frontal vajayjay?!) Secondly, even though the female villains are clearly equal and enthusiastic participants in the cult’s orgies, it’s hammered home that Amanda was kidnapped and raped; keeping the virgin/whore dichotomy sadly alive and well in a game that otherwise came close to a pretty enlightened portrayal of female sexual agency.
Despite my misgivings about the treatment of female characters on a story and world-building level, I actually quite liked Amanda. She certainly has more claim to be the protagonist of the game than Jonathan, who has very little impact on the story as he moves through it, and who at one point can pick up and examine every knife in the kitchen before walking off weaponless to take on an entire cult. (Sure, the gameplay is largely that of a walking simulator with some point-and-click adventure features, but could walking around with a meat-cleaver in hand really have gone amiss?) Full disclosure: I did not like Jonathan, who at times came across more like a Victorian maiden aunt swooning at the thought of sex, rather than a man with a legitimate grievance against a bunch of Cthulhu worshippers. I would have liked this game a great deal more if I had been playing as Amanda throughout, rather than just during the brief prologue - and since she clearly has only fragmentary, or at least confused, memories of the year she spent in the cult, none of the mystery need be lost. Heck, she didn’t even need to be kidnapped at the beginning - the story would have worked just as well if it was about a woman who was seduced into joining the cult, began to question and investigate it over time, and was eventually presented with the decision to stay and comply or risk leaving. If this sounds like a total rewrite, I maintain that the core plot of Amanda trying to escape the cult with her baby could remain completely the same, while making this story about a woman’s time in a sex cult actually feel female-driven.
So, after expounding all my criticisms, would I recommend the game? Well, to be fair, it actually does have a lot going for it. Its concept is truly original: if you want a story about a Cthulhu sex cult, this is definitely where you want to start. Also, for what was basically a two-person production team, it’s been put together amazingly well. As a demonstration of what Movie Games Lunarium are capable of, it’s incredibly promising. It’s obviously not going to be for everyone; but if you go in expecting what you’re getting - a game about bad sex and Cthulhu - you won’t be disappointed.
The Stories Unfold: Somehow, I found the time to play lots of interactive fiction games this month, too!
Let’s face it, everybody’s got their preferences, and there’s no denying I’ve got a strong inclination towards narrative gaming right now. I started this month by finishing off the last mission from Episode 3 of The Council that I wrote about for Game of the Month in July. I know I rhapsodised about it enough then, but really: it’s such a good game. The final puzzle in Episode 3 caused me to construct my first video game crazy wall in ages, filling pages of paper with annotated notes until I could be sure I’d got it just right. And then - sweet success! The rest of the month has basically consisted of staving off withdrawal symptoms by counting down the unknown (but surely depleting) number of days until Episode 4.
No, not really! Not when I still have my run-through of Life is Strange to complete (Bae over Bay!) - a labour of love that becomes more urgent by the day, as now I have not only Before the Storm but also the imminent release of Life is Strange 2 to look forward to.
Oh, and: I finally finished Heavy Rain! Honestly though, it’s going to take a separate review blog to unpack all of that. But Special Agent Norman Jayden survived, so I was happy.
Last up: Thanks to Aramis, I’ve finally been able to return to The Wolf Among Us. I’ve been playing it for nearly two years and had only finished Episode 3 of 5 due to Porthos’s increasingly off-putting tendency towards painful lag and a harshly-lit screen. I made it two-thirds of the way through Episode 4 in a single sitting the other night, and am now quite hopeful of finishing it in time for Season 2 next year.
It’s Finally Here! Let’s Play We Happy Few (...the demo)
My fucked-up, dystopian-obsessed little heart nearly exploded this August 10th, when We Happy Few was finally given a full release after over two years in early access limbo. I say “nearly” because I haven’t bought it yet - partly because it’s inadvisable to buy yourself a game you’ve been banging on about for years when it’s finally released a month before your birthday; and partly because new games are expensive and I couldn’t clear my schedule enough to ensure I gave it the time it (and my investment in it) would have merited.
But I did have a 45 minute time-locked demo on my Xbox, a new capture card and studio microphone from my Generous Benefactors, and a dream! A dream of recording an awkward let’s play of We Happy Few that ends abruptly after 37 minutes for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet. But it was a great experience - my new equipment ran without a hitch; I enjoyed recording it even if my style is nowhere near YouTube-worthy yet; and I’m hooked on the game, even if I spent so much time mooching around Arthur’s office I’m barely into the sewer levels. I even got an achievement (diamond, no less!) which I didn’t even know you could do on a demo, so thanks for being cool about it, Xbox!
Gaming as a Family: Hidden Object Games, Morph Girl, & Multiplayer
Early this month, I took Aramis Laptop with me on an extended visit to my parents’ house for my Dad’s birthday. He was the one to introduce me to gaming early in my childhood, and was responsible for nearly every gaming purchase that affected my early experience of the medium. These days, however, he prefers slower-paced entertainment, and has developed a major fondness for hidden object games. I bought him three for his birthday - Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, Victorian Mysteries: The Yellow Room, and Small Town Terrors: Pilgrim’s Hook - and we played the first two during my visit. The Victorian Mysteries series, which adapts classic novels into HO games, delivered as ever; but my impulse purchase of Letters from Hell proved to be laughably bad (but at least we were laughing).
I also showed off Aramis’s capabilities by doing a quick group run of Morph Girl with my folks, since it’s based on unreleased footage from an indie horror film (one of their favourite genres) and easy to play in one sitting. However, they quickly became less concerned with my shiny new laptop than with the behaviour of the game’s protagonist, Elana, who they both took a vocal dislike to. I theorise that this may be because the character’s neglected wife happens to share my first name, though it might just be because Elana really is a bit of a dick.
My partner came to join us for the weekend and, despite my entreaties, I didn’t manage to entice my parents into a four-player game of Monster Prom. (They loved Cards Against Humanity so it seemed like safe enough material.) The two of us did, however, play with the new Fuckin’ Hot Summer Update on our own later. We didn’t get around to much of the new story material, but the artwork updates are evident right off the bat, and worth checking out in their own right. Miranda’s adorable new summer dress reinforced her as my personal bae among the love interests, even if she does get sidelined by the necessity of supporting my OTP (Damien/Amira 5EVA!).
Mobile Gaming: I dug out my PSP, played The Sims 2, and got sidetracked
My gaming laptop is nice and portable, but my gaming habit isn’t yet problematic enough that I regularly bring along my consoles for a few days away. As ever I had my trusty Lara Croft: Relic Run with me, and just for giggles I dug out and brought along my PSP too.
I didn’t have a PSP when they were actually a thing. I bought mine second-hand three or four years ago with one goal in mind: to play The Sims 2 PSP exclusive port. Why buy a whole new used-good mini-console just to run a game I already had on PC and PS2? Because the story of The Sims 2 for PSP is one of my favourites in the franchise, and somehow never made it onto anything other than this one fairly obscure platform. I always thought it would have been a perfect fit for the PC-based Sims Stories, a spin-off series that got three entries at around the same time this game was released.
Instead of the usual sandbox, The Sims 2 PSP hangs a pretty tightly written story off of the usual Sims game mechanics: one that takes place in the fan-favourite location of Strangetown; features popular characters like Bella Goth; and actually plays out a lot of the stories of conspiracy theories, serial killings, and otherworldly events that were hinted at in the PC version but, due to the nature of the gameplay, were never anything more serious than flavour text in-game.
So I’m once again inching my Sim incrementally closer to unravelling some of these mysteries, while at the same time remembering my realisation of a few years ago as to why the PSP was quickly replaced with the Vita. My main gripe is that the screen is so damned reflective you have to be in a completely darkened room not to see mostly your own face staring back at you - acceptable (if not particularly good for your eye-health) when playing alone at night in your childhood bedroom, but less easy to get on with when you bring it along to play during your break at work. In all honestly, I fairly quickly switched back to making expy characters in The Sims 4 on PC.
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