Over the years I’ve played a lot of games in a lot of different genres, but the graphic-adventure, or “interactive novel” is one I rarely come across. Although the popularity of these kinds of games is pretty high in Japan, the genre is hard to get into here in the states.
It’s also niche as hell, because a lot of these games don’t really even have much in the way of actual gameplay. Take Lux-Pain, for instance. This flashy, anime-style looks pretty interesting … essentially it’s about an organization of parapsychologists secretly fighting a plague of psychic “worms” that have possessed the people of Japan.
These “worms” in turn cause their hosts to act strange and irrational and commit crimes or kill people or god knows what else, particularly in the presence of a progenitor psychic parasite known as “silent.”
You play (what else) a 17-year-old agent (with silver hair) who’s working undercover at the local high school, doubling as a student while investigating for silent and psychically “erasing” worms among the students and faculty.
Ahem.
For all two of you still reading this, you may be thinking this sounds something like a cross between Hotel Dusk and the latest Persona. You would be wrong, however.
This is how the gameplay in Lux-Pain (so named for psychic abilities which in turn carry the names of figures in Arthurian legend … what?) goes down: you’re having a conversation with someone. Suddenly, you sense of a shift in the “shinen,” or thoughts, of whomever you’re talking to.
So you bust out your psychic ability and erase the worms plaguing them, since clearly, any time people think, it’s because they have worms. The erasing is done with the stylus—you scratch out an area over the person’s portrait and when you find worms scratch them out too, which reveals the person’s thoughts.
Your reward is getting to see the person’s thoughts appear on the top screen of the DS in a loosely organized jumble. So, “gameplay” basically amounts to a psychic lottery scratch off whose prize is information.
The other thing about Lux-Pain is that virtually none of what I’ve outlined above is stated explicitly. I got most of the information about the game by reading optional databases. Yes, really.
And yet, instead of lambasting the game (too much), I like it—it’s a good guilty pleasure game, like Rumble Roses. Maybe it’s the quasi-dating sim relationships you can cultivate with your attractive classmates. Or maybe I just wanted to see where the unintentionally goofy, totally nonsensical story would go next. I don’t know.
I will say this: Lux-Pain is definitely not going to enthrall you with its so-called gameplay. It really is like reading a book—albeit one that’s chock full of silly anime tropes, a typo-heavy localization and some really terrible writing.
But hey, maybe some anime nuts will be able to look past that. Maybe.