Lust for Darkness

I want to start this review with an important life lesson: Don't sneak into a sex cult at a creepy old mansion. It didn't work out for Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, and is causing the hero at the center the new game Lust for Darkness all kinds of problems. A big orgy may sound appealing, but it's all fun and games until the knives come out and everybody tries to kill you. Grab your mask and robes, because we have a party to crash.

This is story of a man named Jonathan who, after months of searching, has finally given up hope that his missing wife is still alive. But his life is changed forever when he receives a mysterious letter from what appears to be his late wife. With little more than a vague clue to her whereabouts, Jonathan is lured to an old mansion that is playing host to what appears to be a sex cult. This is just the start of an unforgettable evening filled with puzzles and danger.

Lust for Darkness is the not-so-subtle mix between Eyes Wide Shut and Amnesia, with a bit of Lovecraft and H.R. Giger thrown in for good measure. We wander around a creepy but largely generic mansion in hopes of finding Jonathan's wife and escaping before anything bad happens. But I think we're too late for that, because the night takes a wicked turn when the unexplainable starts to happen.

As a first-person horror game, Lust for Darkness is pretty straight-forward. We spend most of our time exploring a linear path and solving a handful of painfully simple puzzles. From time-to-time you'll need to pick up an item, but the object you need to use it on is usually only a few steps away. There are also a couple of stealth bits, though they don't last very long. What I'm saying is that there's nothing about the gameplay that will stand out in any way, you're really just here for a roller coaster ride through a scary old mansion.

If that's all you're looking for, then you'll probably have a good time getting to the bottom of this mystery. It's short, coming in at just over two hours, but tells a full story with a bunch of fun twists and turns along the way. But as somebody who has played a lot of these first-person horror games, I found myself wanting more. I wished there was more depth to the gameplay or more puzzle solving. I was miffed that the story was so predictable and found myself rolling my eyes at the dumb ending.

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It sometimes feels like the developers spent so much time modeling completely useless items you can interact with that they forgot to make a more interesting mansion. You'll occasionally run into an item needed to open up one of the side stories, but almost everything you can interact with is just a pointless tea kettle or pencil sharpener. It's the kind of game that will let you open every drawer in the mansion, but there's never anything interesting inside. Well, that's not true; there are a lot of sex toys and statues with erections. Actually, that's most of what you find in this game.

That's one of the few times this game shows its personality. There's an incredibly stylish cinema at the start and a few flourishes throughout the mansion that hint at the kind of people that live there, but most of the settings are a bit on the generic side. Even when you start to experience what this sex cult has been keeping secret, you'll quickly get bored of the samey corridors. What's more, the frame rate is never stable and the game has a bad habit of hitching up. The whole thing let me down.

While Lust for Darkness manages to provide a few genuinely unnerving moments, I was ultimately disappointed by the straight-forward gameplay, simple puzzles and short run time. It's the kind of game that starts out promising enough, but gradually gets less interesting the more you uncover. The result is a horror game with a few scary scenes that don't add up to much.