--Willard, Lust for Darkness: Dawn Edition
Lust for Darkness deserves acknowledgment for its mixture of bold eroticism and the occult with cosmic horror, but its gameplay and plot are rather lackluster. The result is that of an excellent concept being squandered on a very mediocre and short game. Still, the uniqueness of the premise might be enough to persuade fans of philosophical horror to play the game simply for the concepts behind it. Unfortunately, it ultimately does very little to truly attempt to develop the lore or explore the horror of elevating sexual pleasure above all other things, but it is an indie game that was reportedly made by only six people. This does not make the problems disappear, but it does mean the team had far fewer human resources than many game development groups.
Production Values
A game directly addressing sensuality and sexuality needs clear graphics in order to capitalize on the visual aspects of the subject matter. While sculptures and some sequences emphasize the sensual nature of sexuality, the graphics are tame compared to the best of the Switch. The genitalia of both men and women are notably missing--something that may have been edited for the purpose of avoiding an AO (Adults Only) rating but still removes part of the thematic impact. Other issues with the visuals have to do with the performance. Near the beginning of the game, ground textures did not even appear until I walked within a certain distance, and the disparity between the loaded and incomplete textures was blatant. Thankfully, the sound is more consistent in its performance, even if the voice acting is not of the highest quality. The dialogue is delivered through largely bland voice acting that is still better than the voicework in the somewhat comparable Agony, but the content of some of the side conversations you can listen to are actually of great philosophical importance. The unique thematic framework of the game simply is not enough to salvage the deficiencies in the production values and game mechanics.
Gameplay
There is little to do in Lust for Darkness besides walk around, listen to cultists, pick up objects, and occasionally run away from extraterrestrial beings. This is no exaggeration. Combat is nowhere to be found, and most of the puzzles are nothing more than moving an object from one place to a nearby slot of some kind. Many of the random objects you can interact with literally serve no purpose as far as progression or lore in concerned. In addition to these flaws and limitations, there is only one "boss" in the entire game, which is not even defeated by directly fighting it. Players expecting a lengthy game full of variety and developed stealth or combat will be disappointed.
Story
Spoilers below!
A woman named Amanda Moon is abducted by the leader of a sex cult, but a letter from her to her husband Jonathan is delivered to him a year later. Given an address, Jonathan pretends to be a member of the cult in order to find his wife, but he finds that the cultists are about to venture into Lusst'ghaa, a land in what seems to be a separate dimension. The most genuine devotees of the cult treat pleasure, and sexual pleasure in particular, as the sole purpose of human life. Lusst'ghaa turns out to be lethal above all else, threatening both Jonathan and those who pledged their lives to discover its secrets.
Intellectual Content
Mild puzzles must be solved to make progress, but the themes dealing with the deep pleasure of sexuality and the ultimate nature of metaphysics, even though they could have been handled with far more depth if the story was stronger, are far more intellectually significant. Sexuality allows for pleasures that are more personal and potentially intense than many other types of pleasure. As a Christian and a rationalist, I celebrate this! However, to elevate it above all other aspects of human nature trivializes even sexuality and pleasure themselves--to understand sexuality, one must use reason to analyze it, and those who love a thing tend to desire to understand it. Intellectual soundness must be tossed aside in order for pleasure of any kind to be made the chief goal of someone's life. One of the first casualties of hedonism is whatever small influence a rationalistic worldview might have on those who pledge their lives to the pursuit of pleasure. Rather than cling to the facts that reason governs all things and that moral obligations dictate how one should live regardless of preference, a hedonist rejects the intellectual pleasures of rationalism for an overemphasis on subjective gratification.
Reason is even hypothesized by one cultist to be madness, which is an utter possibility because one can only be "mad" in the sense of insane when one holds to fallacious beliefs. Not even experiencing hallucinations, as the main character does in another (and much better) cosmic horror game called The Sinking City, makes a person irrational because experiences do not reflect one's intellect. Rationality is about belief that is in accordance with the laws of logic, and even people who are not suffering from hallucinations cannot use reason to prove that they are not hallucinating particular external objects into their miscellaneous sensory perceptions. There is simply no way to prove to yourself that you are sane beyond grasping and soundly utilizing the laws of logic, which cannot be altered by anything. There is no possible way for even a deity or other imagined or unimagined being to render the laws of logic invalid. Even if God himself wished for something unsound to logically follow from a concept, he would only wish in vain.
Conclusion
Perhaps one day Lust for Darkness will be remade with the higher budget and more sophisticated storytelling the concepts call for. As it stands, the game's brevity and simplicity (in the sense that the mechanics are undeveloped or superficial) shackle it to mediocrity. The foundational themes are spectacular all the same, and it is unlikely that a non-indie creative team would ever produce something that touches on them in the current climate of the Western entertainment industry. It is also to the credit of the creators that sexuality is not presented as playing a stronger, weaker, or otherwise different role in the lives of men and women--and that a corrupted woman is implied to be moments from raping Jonathan at the very end. Lust for Darkness does handle sexuality without ever falling into the philosophical and creative pitfalls of gender stereotypes. If only it handled the rest of its components with the same quality, it could have been a phenomenal indie game.
Content:
1. Violence: Creatures of Lusst'ghaa chase you at specific points and will kill you if you do not flee. Bloody corpses of cultists are found.
2. Profanity: At least one variant of "damn," "shit," and "fuck" is used.
3. Nudity: Female breasts don't count as genuine nudity, but multiple topless women can be seen in the mansion after the erotic festivities begin. A woman's naked corpse is seen outside of the first portal to Lusst'ghaa, but her genitalia, like the genitalia of the male bodies, seem to not even have been animated. Later in the game, a nude man crawls up a staircase, his buttocks visible.
4. Sexuality: The deep nature of erotic pleasure is a blatant theme throughout most of the game. There is no actual sex shown onscreen, but sexual pleasure is referenced repeatedly, and sexual acts are captured in sculptures. One shows what appears to be a female alien from Lusst'ghaa holding her foot on the back of a human woman crawling on all fours, the alien also holding a chain linked to a collar on the human woman.
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