Lust for Darkness has a great atmosphere and some great lore but it doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. It created this wonderful backstory with an interesting alternate universe and a cult trying to access it but it fails to explore either in much detail. You don’t get to figure out what the origins of the cult are; why they want to find Lusst’ghaa; or just what the beings on the other side are or their motivations. Maybe I’m trying to dig too deep into this but I feel there was a lot of uncovered potential. What I was left with was a game about a man whose wife went missing; no idea the circumstances of that; and he is just blindly trying to get his wife back without asking any questions. The puzzles in the game are not overly difficult but border on annoying at times. They also feel a bit out of place and kind of just there to add some actual gameplay to an otherwise story driven game. There is a stealth section that was a tad annoying as I hate stealth. There was also enemies that you have to run from that can one hit kill you and you can’t fight back against which is another pet peeve of mine. The opening of doors was also annoying as you have to pull or push with the mouse kind of like in the Amnesia games. I didn’t like it then any more than I do now. The graphics were above average for the most part. The world detail such as shelves; doors; furniture; buildings; objects; etc were great. The detail on bodies was also great. Faces and clothing were a little sub par. The voice acting was pretty weak. The main character almost seemed like he was going for a Bruce Campbell vibe except he isn’t Bruce Campbell and this isn’t Evil Dead. His wife was a little better but still wasn’t anything more than decent. There wasn’t much music in the game but the end credits music was a good choice.
I played Lust for Darkness on Linux using Proton. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs. The game auto saves at various points and has only the one save slot. Alt-Tab works. There is 1 AA setting; 1 AF setting; 3 SSAO settings; and 3 other graphic options. The game generally ran from 74-144 FPS but could dip down to 29-56 FPS at times almost randomly. It isn’t a fast paced game so the lag wasn’t very noticeable when it did.
Disk Space Used: 14.62 GB
VRAM Used: 3512-5577 MB
CPU Usage: 40-65 %
RAM Usage: 3.7-4.4 GB
Frame Rate: 29-144 FPS
It may seem like I really didn’t enjoy Lust for darkness but I just feel like it had more to give than it did. If you enjoy HP Lovecraft media; movies like Event Horizon or Hellraiser than you may like this game. If they expanded the lore more I would have loved it. I finished the game in 2 hours and 48 minutes. It feels a bit short given how many questions I had unanswered and it even ended on a bit of a cliffhanger leaving one more before it was all over. There are worse games than Lust for Darkness but there are better as well. Conarium is what this game could have been in my eyes. Hopefully the sequel addresses my issues. I paid $6.79 CAD for the game and it isn’t bad value for the content or length. The full price, which is $16.99 CAD right now, is a bit steep.
My Score: 6/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 20.0.5 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 19.0.2 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.6.7-1-MANJARO | Proton 5.0-7