Lust from Beyond

My backlog coincidentally offering next a fitting game for Halloween, it was time to play Lust from Beyond. I wasn't expecting a great experience: I bought the game mostly because I was already invested in the series. On the way to Beyond's release, Movie Games Lunarium put out two shorter, prelude type of deals: Lust from Beyond: Prologue and Lust from Beyond: Scarlet. (Despite being free, they both count towards your Steam achievement stats, curiously enough.)

The lust returns, deeper than before

I had forgotten what happened in them since I played them back in 2020 and so I quickly replayed them and the series' first game, Lust for Darkness, as well. While none of them are long, at some point in Beyond I started to wonder if it had been too much of janky-ass gameplay in a short period of time. This second game is bigger and its gameplay expanded enough that it could be considered survival horror instead of a mere walking simulator. But a smooth experience it is not.

Beyond starts with you as Amanda who is the wife of the first game's protagonist Jonathan. Jonathan saved Amanda from the Cult of Ecstasy (I suppose more specifically from Willard, Amanda's kidnapper) but she didn't actually leave the Cult -- and made Jonathan join it, too. Soon enough you'll switch to the actual main character, Victor, a troubled antiquarian who is eventually more or less invited to the Cult as well.

While the story, characterization, and dialogue all still continue ranging from silly to terrible, by now there are so many pieces in the narrative that there's actual intrigue to it. I got properly interested to see how things would go.

The first game's events caused the Cult to split into two competing groups, the other being called the Scarlet Lodge. The Lodge has slightly different goals and methods, though they too are obsessed with the Lust'ghaa dimension. For the Lodge, it's no longer about just pleasure but pain and violence as well. They add kind of a Hellraiser vibe to the mix.

At the end of Darkness, Amanda put the Cult's mansion to the torch and now they have a new home that is less extravagant but still pretty large, an old three-story house. Meanwhile the Lodge is holed up in a dilapidated theater and its massive basement in a Massachusetts town of Bleakmoor. It is the Lodge that gets to Victor first.

Basic survival horror

Scarlet introduced combat to the series and in this one Victor too gets a knife to eventually fight back with. There's no finesse nor depth to it; you're likely to get hit as much yourself when you go stabbing. A later weapon, revolver, offers a more one-sided way to deal damage. It's required for the game's few boss fights but you get to shoot regular baddies as well -- it seemed more effective against Lust'ghaa's creatures than humans. For the final part of the game, you get a huge box of ammunition that is considered to be bottomless. I reckon that was the developers way of preventing the player getting soft-locked (with the game's single save file) in Lust'ghaa where no one would've hauled ammunition to.

With hindsight, I'd recommend picking the bonus sneak speed over health/sanity as the first upgrade found in Lust'ghaa. The single point to either matters but you can make do without it as long as you keep picking up sedatives and bandages. You definitely need to keep a closer eye on your health and sanity levels in Beyond: Victor's sanity takes a hit from so many things in the first half and there are many people with clubs to bonk you.

A big part of Lust from Beyond, and the series in general, are its alleged eroticism and sexual content. I personally find it lacking in that regard: character models and animations as well as sex scenes are about as not-hot as something like Outlast -- it's all just so grimy. I'd say you can make Skyrim far sexier than this with body and skimpy armor mods. Beyond did manage to jumpscare me few times, though, so at least the horror aspect works to a degree.

Still, for whatever mysterious reason, the games of the series keep feeling poorly optimized. They run at good a framerate yet still feel jerky. The slow walking speed adds to it and the shimmering-causing antialiasing is ugly -- just Unity things, I guess.

More to come

Lust from Beyond has a modest tapestry ending with two major variations: whether you opened Xu'thrar or not. Judging by the still-upcoming sequel's premise, the former is the canon one, although, I'd say the latter could as easily be merely a delay -- someone from the Cult will inevitably open the gate.

The sequel, Lust of God, is not being developed by Lunarium but by their fellow countrymen at Madmind Studio. It's a fitting partnership -- a match made in heaven (hell), really -- because Madmind's own Agony and Succubus are so similar to the Lust series on so many levels. I guess I'll have to play the sequel too at some point in the future. Succubus I have not bought yet despite it being sold at deep discounts these days: I've been debating if I truly want to play it.

Random Witcher 3 reference?