{"id":97020,"date":"2019-07-21T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-21T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/switch-eshop\/lust_for_darkness"},"modified":"2019-07-21T15:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-21T15:00:00","slug":"review-lust-for-darkness-a-clumsy-trip-through-a-depraved-hellscape-thats-as-sexy-as-it-sounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/07\/21\/review-lust-for-darkness-a-clumsy-trip-through-a-depraved-hellscape-thats-as-sexy-as-it-sounds\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Lust For Darkness &#8211; A Clumsy Trip Through A Depraved Hellscape That&#8217;s As Sexy As It Sounds"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/6d0e81a550b3f\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/6d0e81a550b3f\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<div id>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Lust for Darkness Review - Screenshot 1 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/97851\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/97851\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Lust for Darkness Review - Screenshot 1 of 4\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>Two-and-a-half-years into its inception and Nintendo Switch isn\u2019t struggling for games of a horrific persuasion. From unnerving yet humorous adventures such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/padre\"><strong>The Padre<\/strong><\/a> to zombie-ridden action adventures a la <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/resident_evil_4\"><strong>Resident Evil 4<\/strong><\/a>, us hybrid handheld owners have plenty of grisly titles to satisfy our gluttony for the macabre. One thing we don\u2019t have much of, not surprisingly, is <em>sex<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get us wrong; we\u2019ve had the likes of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/senran_kagura_reflexions\"><strong>Senran Kagura Reflexions<\/strong><\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/nintendo-switch\/senran_kagura_peach_ball\"><strong>Senran Kagura: Peach Ball<\/strong><\/a> (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\u2019s 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. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/lust_for_darkness\"><strong>Lust for Darkness<\/strong><\/a> presents the most explicit and overt use of sexual imagery on Switch in the West, so, as you might have guessed, it\u2019s a game that\u2019s <em>absolutely not suitable<\/em> for any of the platform\u2019s younger players.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Lust for Darkness Review - Screenshot 2 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/97853\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/97853\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Lust for Darkness Review - Screenshot 2 of 4\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>So, yes, Lust for Darkness <em>is<\/em> 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 <em>never<\/em> stately or quaint in video games) to find his beau and save her from the sex cult that\u2019s been holding her hostage.<\/p>\n<p>It soon becomes apparent that said cult is using grotesque sexual rituals to create doorways to an alternate reality known as Lusst\u2019ghaa (needless to say, it&#8217;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\u2019s another attempt to siphon off the otherworldly corruption and madness we\u2019ve come to associate with the work of HP Lovecraft with the sexualised body horror of HR Giger\u2019s creations. While it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Lust for Darkness Review - Screenshot 3 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/97850\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/97850\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Lust for Darkness Review - Screenshot 3 of 4\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>As you explore the mansion in search of your missing spouse, you\u2019ll alternate between the candlelit corridors of the real world and its masked members of the cult and the <strong>Alien<\/strong>-esque realm of Lusst\u2019ghaa. While you\u2019ll only have to contend with the occasional sex toy in the mansion, you\u2019ll encounter more and more nightmarish creations in the twisted reality that\u2019s melding with normality. Since this is a family-friendly website, we can\u2019t really go into <em>too<\/em> 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\u2019s like <strong>Eyes Wide Shut<\/strong> played through the prism of <strong>Hellraiser<\/strong>, and is about as sexy as that fusion suggests.<\/p>\n<p>There are some genuinely unsettling moments \u2013 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\u2019s true aims \u2013 but for the clever little turns (including how well the two realities are stitched together, invoking a sense of unravelling sanity similar to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/layers_of_fear_legacy\"><strong>Layers of Fear<\/strong><\/a>), 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\u2019ll evade slow-moving monsters or hide from gruesome pursuers in clunky stealth sections, but it&#8217;s pretty poor in terms of innovation. It ends up offering very little you haven\u2019t played before, and in better iterations.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Lust for Darkness Review - Screenshot 4 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/97867\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/97867\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Lust for Darkness Review - Screenshot 4 of 4\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>The version that\u2019s been ported to Nintendo Switch doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s left of the lighting model helps give the mansion a grim semi-lit quality; Lusst\u2019ghaa 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"conclusion\">\n<h2 class=\"heading\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>It doesn\u2019t 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 <em>yet another<\/em> doorway shaped like genitalia, you realise it\u2019s just that: hollow grotesquery employed for the sake of making you cringe. There are a handful of moments of genuine unease, but they\u2019re 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\u2019s a mercilessly brief experience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two-and-a-half-years into its inception and Nintendo Switch isn\u2019t 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\u2019t have much [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}