Two-and-a-half-years into its inception and Nintendo Switch isn’t struggling for games of a horrific persuasion. From unnerving yet humorous adventures such as The Padre to zombie-ridden action adventures a la Resident Evil 4, us hybrid handheld owners have plenty of grisly titles to satisfy our gluttony for the macabre. One thing we don’t have much of, not surprisingly, is sex.
Don't get us wrong; we’ve had the likes of Senran Kagura Reflexions or Senran Kagura: Peach Ball (or anything involving the Senran Kagura series), but both have revealed themselves to be nothing more than cheap titillation featuring girls of questionable maturity. It’s a subject that still holds something of a taboo for games, especially on Nintendo hardware, but the Big N seems far more open to more unusual (and sometimes far less tasteful) experiences following the considerable success of the platform. Lust for Darkness presents the most explicit and overt use of sexual imagery on Switch in the West, so, as you might have guessed, it’s a game that’s absolutely not suitable for any of the platform’s younger players.
So, yes, Lust for Darkness is a horror game, but one that uses sex as a theme to drive the bleak nature of its story. You play one Jonathan Moon, a man struggling to cope with the disappearance of his wife a year prior. When he unexpectedly receives a letter from said erstwhile spouse, our Mr Moon heads straight for a creepy-looking mansion (because mansions are never stately or quaint in video games) to find his beau and save her from the sex cult that’s been holding her hostage.
It soon becomes apparent that said cult is using grotesque sexual rituals to create doorways to an alternate reality known as Lusst’ghaa (needless to say, it's not listed on TripAdvisor). Here, sex and violence have become one horrific mixture of blood lust and ecstasy, where its denizens have become twisted and deformed by their devotion to unseen forces. Effectively, it’s another attempt to siphon off the otherworldly corruption and madness we’ve come to associate with the work of HP Lovecraft with the sexualised body horror of HR Giger’s creations. While it’s certainly unusual to see these two themes combined in video game form, the game beneath is quite run-of-the-mill in terms of unease and scares.
As you explore the mansion in search of your missing spouse, you’ll alternate between the candlelit corridors of the real world and its masked members of the cult and the Alien-esque realm of Lusst’ghaa. While you’ll only have to contend with the occasional sex toy in the mansion, you’ll encounter more and more nightmarish creations in the twisted reality that’s melding with normality. Since this is a family-friendly website, we can’t really go into too much detail, but playing Lust for Darkness is a bit like taking a wrong turn on DeviantArt and falling down a well of phallus-inspired imagery. It’s like Eyes Wide Shut played through the prism of Hellraiser, and is about as sexy as that fusion suggests.
There are some genuinely unsettling moments – such as statues and other seemingly innate objects that come to life if you linger too long, and some of the more trippy moments as you delve further into the cult’s true aims – but for the clever little turns (including how well the two realities are stitched together, invoking a sense of unravelling sanity similar to Layers of Fear), you soon realise this is just another first-person horror game that relies too heavily on cheap, telegraphed jump scares, exploration and the solving of simple puzzles. You’ll evade slow-moving monsters or hide from gruesome pursuers in clunky stealth sections, but it's pretty poor in terms of innovation. It ends up offering very little you haven’t played before, and in better iterations.
The version that’s been ported to Nintendo Switch doesn’t fare particularly well, either. The framerate chugs a little too often, while many of the more intricate textures and lighting effects have been lost in order to get Lust for Darkness running on a machine with lower specs. There are still plenty of well-rendered character models and what’s left of the lighting model helps give the mansion a grim semi-lit quality; Lusst’ghaa also possesses an otherworldly feel with its vein-like bracken and bloody roots, but this is very much an inferior version of the game when compared to the PC original.
Conclusion
It doesn’t take very long for Lust for Darkness to overplay its hand and reveal just what kind of horror game it really is; for all the shock value of seeing some Giger-esque creature with an overtly phallic head or yet another doorway shaped like genitalia, you realise it’s just that: hollow grotesquery employed for the sake of making you cringe. There are a handful of moments of genuine unease, but they’re few and far between in what is ultimately a short trudge through sex-inspired horror landscape that wastes the opportunity to find some genuinely interesting allegory in all that face-value titillation. Still, at around three hours to complete, at least it’s a mercilessly brief experience.
Comments 56
What a surprise!
I was hoping it would have a Dante’s inferno style creepiness like that stage where your in the circle of hell for adultery and you have to fight that gross demon women who has babies crawling out her nipples lol I’m not surprised that it got a crap review.
@Deathwalka
Wait I'm sorry, there is a monster who WHAT?
Hmmm, this or Call of Duty...
Played this with a group of my friends last week. While it is lacking in content and quality, I want to stress that the absurdity of it all made for an absolutely exceptional experience. We were laughing so hard at some parts. I would not play this on my own seriously though.
It’s pretty rare to find any kind of media, outside of literature, that manages to do cosmic horror right. Throwing shocking things at your face actually is a betrayal of what makes this type of horror work, since it is meant to play on your imagination and play on what is “behind the curtain” so to speak.
Hopefully the port of that game The Sinking City is more true to the genre than this piece of boneheaded exploitation.
its a shame they couldn't get the switch version, pc version is great though, i backed its sequel which is looking to be way better than the first.
Looking forward to playing this gem. Have been wanting a way to exploit mindless women on the go for ages!!
Lust'ghaaa/10
I feel like it was going for Blue Velvet but ended up being a dodgy cosmic horror inspired Harry Potter smut-fic.
Meh. Not my kind of game anyway. I prefer just plain sexy/sexualized to overt perversion, and I don't do horror. But it's nice to see that the game wasn't outright banned or anything..
@PBandSmelly Have you not heard of the epic poem from Dante? Divine Comedy (sometimes called "L'Inferno"). In the section he is referring to, Dante must make his way through those that have their hearts filled with lust, including unwanted babies and babies that have not been baptised.
@nessisonett The bizarre conundrum is that I agree censorship limits creativity in games, but even if it disappeared tomorrow- What would we get? The only reasons video games involve sex is to arrouse either shock or satisfy base level sexual appetites. To treat sex in this way shows its own kind of prudishness since it’s only there to excite the player into thinking they are seeing something that they are not supposed to, an emotion that usually subsides after a normal person’s teenage years.
In other words, consumers need to equally ask the question of how sexuality is incorporated into games just as much as the censorship question.
Good game and very brave move of Nintendo to publish not censored version.
@nessisonett I would disagree, it's origins don't really lie in this or even necessarily fiction. The article also says "otherworldly corruption", but if you look with eyes to see then you would discover the influence can come from our own world, as much as we would rather ignore it.
Well, the trailer with no gameplay whatsoever was already a major red flag.
@NotTelevision THIS. I understand “in theory” censorship is bad,but if censorship went away,every game would just be deprived sex and crazy gore.
There are better much better sources for both lust and horror out there.
...We get it, you guys hate the Senran Kagura games....but they're way better than this crap.
My only problem with overt sexualization in video games is that I’ve never seen an example where it’s a compliment to a GREAT GAME. It’s always just the overriding gimmick against mediocre slop gameplay. It’s like, “why make the game good when we can just put in some tits and panties, throw that red meat onto the internet and wait for the money to roll in.” They all know there’s enough thirst out there, despite REALLY BAD GAMEPLAY. I don’t even get it. This game will do well, there’s already a sequel announced. Every Senran Kagura game is bad, and they’ve sold millions of that crap. And then to top it off, if you call any of it out for being bad games, you’re mobbed as some sort of evil Puritan SJW commie by the hive mind.
Looks like I'm waiting on a massive sale,lol.
@gloom haha yeah there are definitely games that can be good in a 'shared ridicule' kind of way that have almost no merit on their own
Lmao of course there's someone in here calling the writers sad virgins lmao.
Doesn't surprise me in the least.
@commentlife
I don't necessarily care to defend smutty games lol, but as far as Senran Kagura goes, I think Marvelous and XSeed deserve due credit: they do more than throw a coat of sexy paint on a bad game. Their underlying gameplay (whether it's a rhythm cooking sim, a brawler, pinball game, or 3rd person arena shooter) tends to be at least average.
@Frontiersmann “at least average” just doesn’t cut it for me, I guess. I would rather play a truly excellent game and look at some truly excellent bodies, as opposed to playing a maybe mediocre game with some fake anime bodies. To each their own, but I am 100% OK admitting that I straight up just don’t get the appeal of it.
EDIT: And I don’t mean to knock the creatives involved in these games. Just as most fans of these games would love to play a truly kick arse, critically acclaimed game with boobies and butts in it, most of the designers/writers/programmers also probably went into these games wanting to make a truly kick arse, critically acclaimed game with boobies and butts in it. However, I can almost guarantee that most conversations with the wallet men producer-types at the top boil down to some version of: “sure, we can make your boobies game, but I’m not gonna spend a whole lot of money on it, because I don’t have to.”
@Joeynator3000 its bugs me they gave peach ball a 4 because the reviewer had some bias against senran kagura games because it shows too much skin which is ridiculous.
@commentlife Every senran kagura game is bad speak for yourself dude theres alot of people that enjoy these games.
@RiasGremory I really have a hard time believing any Senran Kagura game ever got a low score because it showed skin. The inverse is likely the truer case, where some reviewers tack on a few points because it does. Peach Ball got a 4 because it’s a full priced pinball game with only two tables.
@commentlife if you read the review on peach ball it definitely sounds like he has something against these type of games and yes i agree peach ball has just 2 tables but giving it a 4 is plain dumb plus we dont know if they ll add more tables and characters in future dlc.
One of those things where everybody just feels very uncomfortable by the end of it, and not in a thought provoking way... no thanks
So, a 4 out of 10, huh? Alrighty, then. In that case, I guess I'll just go back to playing ThriXXX games...
I feel like Dante’s Inferno was the only game I enjoyed that just happened to have lots of sexualized moments. Because, yo me, those sections made sense and were complimentary to the direction of the overall game.
This just sounds like Eternal Darkness with naughty bits.
@RiasGremory 'reviewing the game on its content instead of speculating in its favour is dumb'
@RiasGremory Yeah, I think the other complaint was that the pinball gameplay wasn't realistic or something. Ugh...
Senran Kagura games were never meant to be taken seriously...
@Jayofmaya Inferno is just the first third of the Divine Comedy and I'm pretty sure that in the original poem unbaptised babies are in the limbo, not in the lust circle.
1 out of10! Because I cannot play this one handed. Sorry I didn't play the game just felt someone needed to make the obligatory masturbation joke that fails.
@commentlife
You have to consider it is gamble. To release the games you so want "Truly excellent" requires a lot of resources, and requires a lot of sales in order to be proffitable. To include overly sexualized content in a game like that would be risky, because a lot of close minded people would reject the game to begin with and the sales would suffer.
Because of that, yo receive decent and average games at best. Which I would say the first SK game is definitely in that camp, a solid 8/10 IMO thanks to the gameplay and story...not so much the sequel which I also got, far better graphics and sexiness, lost points in the narrative and the gameplay.
And for that matter, ever heard of the DOA fighting series (not the beach themed spinoffs)? those are quite fine fighting games with a lots of the killer bodies you seem to want to see.
@AndreaF96 Yes, followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso, but the L'Inferno would be the first chapter to get if you get them separately. My mistake about not specifying the right circle from the poem, I also played the ps3 classic and so referred to that as the original poster had done.
@Peterjr1 you miss my point man if you compare other reviews for peach ball from other sites to this one here they reviewed it with no bias towards it like not deducting points for too much skin showing or wat their wearing while on here thats wat exactly happen true senran games are not for everyone i get that but reviewers shouldnt let their disgust of these type games get in the way of giving out scores.
@RiasGremory This site likes Super Monkey ball, not peach balls.
Can we get an 'F' in the chat? Press F to Lusst'ghaa.
-the sun rises over the plains beneath Pride Rock-
LUSST'GHAAAAAAAAAAAAA-NAM-BEY-YAAAAAAAAAA
I remember Prey game was released on xbox 360. It did had som sexual stuff in it and it got a poor score too. But I did enjoy that game a lot. So don't let the low score make you skip te game. if you like what you see go for it
This is exactly the kind of rubbish I wish I could filter out of my eShop experience. So much of my time wasted scrolling through growing lists of low budget, uninspired, bloat-ware, ex-mobile nonsense.
The amount of new revenue Nintendo are amassing through the eShop on Switch, it is frustrating that they seemingly choose to invest none of it back into the infrastructure, functionality, procurement and editorial (by which I mean editors highlighting decent games).
I don't mind NL reviewing this stuff - it's mildly entertaining - but there's no excuse for Nintendo giving this rubbish the exact same eShop presence as higher reviewed, higher performing, higher quality games.
And that's not to mention all the "games" that keep using "sales" to boost their visibility.
eShop is a minefield. Literally feel like I'm mining for diamonds every time I enter that torrid place - and all I come out with is a bunch of fools gold.
@AlexOlney is doing a video review of this, right? Please tell me Alex is doing a video review!
Huh, an exceptionally well written review.
I expected far more throwaway jokes for a game like that, and got quite a lot of clever comparisons. Kudos!
But i have no clue what this "passive horror" trend won't just die off.
If was a clever gimmick the first time around, it could hold its charm for a second run, but the formula is running dry...ironic, considering the theme...
@Deathwalka Was always sad we never got sequels to that, really loved that game. It has some messed up visuals, but overall an interesting run through Dante's depection of purgatory and hell.
I'm certainly one of the people that advocate for more sex in the gaming world, as it is needlessly deprived of it in both explicit and expressive creations.
But hey, I play the games that are fun, worth my time, make me enjoy the gameplay. This seems... not that game.
@PBandSmelly lol yeah in the game does inferno he goes through the seven circles of hell, gluttony, lust, etc
There is some pretty sick and gruesome sites on the way! Awesome game though
@dougphisig so true, I’ve always been surprised that they never made one. Such a good game, first played on my PSP 2000 back in day lol
Xbox 360 was my favourite version
@NotTelevision Eternal Darkness did it right
Lust was removed from NOA e-Shop. Still uncensored version is in NOE region.
https://twitter.com/SimFabric/status/1153656166364393475
@Terrible_Majesty I agree. Loved that game back on the GC. It was really groundbreaking stuff for the time, even when I didn’t read a single word of Lovecraft.
Now I’d say The Last Door is the best cosmic style horror game on the Switch. That one really took me for a ride on the PC.
What is with the blatant attack against Senran Kagura, yeah reflexions was light but only 10$ but peach ball is actually a good pinball game. Grow up, embrace your sexuality and stop being such an awkward child. I'm about ready to unsubscribe from all your junk.
Basically Agony with genitals.
Besides not being good this game is actually more of a sausage fest than anything else so nah.
Tap here to load 56 comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...