Lux-Pain

Lux-Pain sports a slick anime art style, which is quickly overshadowed by inane seek-and-find gameplay and a baffling story. This is a very strange choice of game for Ignition to localize.

It may look and - thanks to strong voice acting - sound like a potentially compelling anime series, but as a playable video game, Lux-Pain is a nonstarter. [Apr 2009, p.85]

You don't have to figure out too much, but it's a twenty hour long story, so it should keep you going for a bit if you can put up with the confusing storyline and translation issues.

Lux-Pain is a game built on some interesting ideas that feel like they were never fully fleshed out, and the result is a half-baked title that most gamers will probably want to abandon after a few minutes.

With nonsensical dialogue muddling the complex plot, Lux-Pain shows how an entire experience can be ruined by poor localization.

It’s a complete train-wreck of a game, only suitable for those with an appreciation for the amazingly awful.

Has no depth, no polish, and no point. [June 2009, p.81]

The premise, when paraphrased, is an interesting one and as a huge fan of last year's Time Hollow and any good mystery in general, I'm always willing to sit through any amount of text if it provides a means to an end, or at the very least, something somewhat cohesive. Lux-Pain fails on both accounts, serving as a poorly thrown together, somewhat interactive novel that really doesn't know what it wants to be - or, if it does know, it certainly doesn't want to be a game.

Honestly, there aren’t any pros of playing this over buying a few Japanese comics or light novels instead if this is the sort of thing you’re looking for, and at least you can go at your own pace versus not being able to wade through the mostly trite dialogue.

Most of Lux-Pain's gameplay is derived from wading through innumerable dialogue boxes by tapping the stylus or pressing a single button. If this sounds like fun to you, save yourself some money by buying a book and arbitrarily clicking your mouse 1,000 times while reading it.

Even if the game wanted to be slightly more interactive than a book, the story is so convoluted that making sense of it takes more effort than playing.

I'm sure that there are excellent and enjoyable visual novels out there, ones that handle character with subtlety, story with passion, and don't treat the reader like an uninitiated idiot - but Lux-Pain isn't one of them.

Unfortunately, the title spends so much time bogging itself down in useless side-stories and suffering from awful translation that the tale never gets off the ground. Even worse, what little gameplay actually exists loses its appeal before the game even gets going.

Developer Killaware has managed to whittle interactivity down to its barest form, reducing the medium's defining characteristic to little more than a progression through text boxes. [June 2009, p.126]

There must have been something critical lost in translation when Lux-Pain was brought over from Japan because I was a few hours into the adventure and I still had very little understanding of what the hell was actually going on.