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Review for Lust from Beyond

Lust from Beyond review
Lust from Beyond review

Like its 2018 predecessor, Lust from Beyond is a melding of the erotic with the horrific that is sure to be one of the most grotesque and extreme horror games you’ll ever play. It doesn’t take a lot of brain power, nor does it require a quick trigger finger or fancy footwork, but it does demand a strong stomach and a whole lot of patience. It’s not the masterpiece it could have been, with a number of technical hiccups and pacing issues weighing it down, but if you see it all the way through to the end, this dark and disgusting experience should leave you largely satisfied.

The game tells the story of antiquarian Victor Holloway. During a romantic evening with Lily, his girlfriend, things seem to be going just fine until the pair become intimate. Victor suffers from hallucinations, and the first one he experiences in-game happens when Lily asks Victor to stop mid-lovemaking. Imagining himself falling into a nightmarish world comprised of organic tunnels made of bone and flesh, Victor wanders this labyrinth, naked, trying find a way out. Eventually he wakes up, falling off the bed. As Lily comes to check on him, he slaps her, and the screen goes black. It’s a grim, unnerving intro on many levels, but only a small taste of what’s to come.

Next we see Victor driving alone to the town of Bleakmoor, which is home to Dr. Austerlitz, a reputed expert in treating the mysterious illness ailing Victor. Eager to mend his now-troubled relationship, Victor has agreed to seek out Austerlitz’s help at Lily’s request, though upon arriving in Bleakmoor he quickly comes to regret his decision. A group called the Scarlet Lodge run the town, and Victor just so happens to have stumbled upon their annual Purge-esque festivities. Victor is rescued by two members of the Cult of Ecstasy, Amanda Moon and her husband Johnathan. Taken to the safety of their manor in the woods, Victor acquaints himself with the residence only to learn shortly thereafter that Lily has been captured by the Scarlet Lodge, and he must go back to Bleakmoor to save her.

This more or less rounds out the game’s first half, with the second half taking several dramatic turns. As it turns out, Victor does not suffer from hallucinations at all. Rather, he actually has the ability to travel to this nightmarish realm known as Lusst’ghaa, and he will come to know the power and burden of his gift. As irredeemably evil as the motivations of the Scarlet Lodge seem, the motivations of the Cult of Ecstasy are equally mysterious. Finding out who can be trusted, and why his unique talent is sought after by both sides, places Victor in a number of unsettling situations, forcing him to make painful decisions.

With the jumps between dimensions to Lusst’ghaa, not to mention the entire town of Bleakmoor being overtaken by a sex cult, it took me a little while to buy into the storyline, initially finding it all a bit silly. However, both worlds are filled with lore and side stories, uncovered by talking with other characters and exploring for notes, books, and other concealed items. The pantheon of gods and the creatures populating Lusst'ghaa are fascinating, and the game does an excellent job of giving just enough explanation to keep you interested without ever overtly revealing how this place came to intersect with humanity. Ultimately the narrative culminates in a suitably exciting climax, with the various plot threads weaving together wonderfully.

Lust from Beyond is peppered with branching choices, giving players some ownership of the story’s direction and Victor’s personality. Many of these options appear in dialogue trees, though some are only hinted at, like when a wounded character asks for help and it is up to you whether to assist them with first aid or simply continue on. While I was skeptical of how impactful these decisions would be, I was genuinely impressed by how much of an effect they had. Victor even has the opportunity to kill people or let them live, which has clear repercussions in the Cult of Ecstasy members’ attitudes towards him, creating different tones for the final third or so of the game.

Some of your decisions alter how characters react towards you and treat you in terms of dialogue and information, while others result in different epilogue sequences. The game has a distinctive fork at the end dictating the actual outcome, but the short still sequences just prior to the credits rolling show how your interactions and choices throughout affected the world around you. There is quite a bit of replay value here, but with only automatic saving at checkpoints available, you’ll have to start over in order to try new things and see what you missed the first time around.

The game is played in first person, with WASD moving Victor around and the mouse used to look and pick up/examine objects close up, though controller input is supported as well. There is a decent amount of interactivity packed into the environments, but most objects are just for show. Certain things can be collected but their purpose can remain unclear, like part of a skull statue I never found a purpose for, leading me to believe I missed out on a secret puzzle somewhere along the way. Some of the documents you discover will be recorded in the Book of Secrets, a log of the various side stories and lore found in the game, though others containing puzzle clues to main objectives do not prompt similar entries.

Occasionally you’ll be blocked from interacting with puzzle items or objects until you have triggered the necessary narrative reveal. A lock box in Victor’s home, for example, is in plain view, though until Victor remembers he previously stored something inside of it, you will not be able to interact with it and solve the puzzle. On one hand, this is a nice way to keep you from becoming overburdened with items with no apparent purpose. On the other hand, with the game sometimes introducing mystery objects like the skull statue, figuring out which things are tied to your immediate goal and which ones can wait takes time to discern.

Unlike most adventures, there is danger to deal with in Lust from Beyond. Areas like Victor’s home and the cult’s manor are typically safe areas, allowing you to roam at your leisure. When out on the lam, however, hunted by members of the Scarlet Lodge or dangerous creatures in Lusst’ghaa, you may be forced to fight, sneak, or run for your life.

Upon arriving in Bleakmoor, Victor obtains a portable lantern, which can be toggled on and off but never runs out of fuel. Fortunately it can remain equipped when using weapons, which comes in handy when violence is necessary. A knife acquired early on can be wielded by clicking and holding the right mouse button and left clicking to swipe it. This is a bit cumbersome, as there were several times when my attempt to attack failed to register. Later on Victor gets a revolver, which works in much the same way. Most enemies go down in two or three swipes/shots, and there does not appear to be any sector-specific damage like headshots. The ragdoll physics when enemies die, coupled with copious amounts of blood, do add a bit of flair, though the lack of damage modelling and audio feedback make combat fairly unexciting. (Speaking of which, though you can draw your weapons in safe areas, you cannot use them to attack friendly NPCs. I tried going on a shooting rampage in the Cult of Ecstasy’s manor, to no avail.)

Sneaking is a bit harder to master. The mechanics are similar to standard stealth games, with the ability to toggle between crouching and standing. When crouched, your footsteps are quieter, allowing you to get closer to enemies without them noticing. Though the game seems to abide by the rules of sound, light, and line of sight, so many of the Scarlet Lodge members wear masks that it can be hard to tell when you’ve been spotted and when they’re just doing a routine patrol and happen to be looking your way. There is a subtle audio cue to let you know when you’re in danger of being discovered, though because the Scarlet Lodge members just stop what they’re doing and start walking towards you without audibly communicating anything about your presence, it can be easy to miss in the tension of the moment.

The scenes where you’re being chased by enemies, helpless to fight back, are among the worst parts of the game. Though Victor can run (while you hold the Shift key), he cannot jump and his interactions with the environment are sluggish. One chase sequence early on across the rooftops of Bleakmoor is especially egregious, as Victor sprints past homicidal cult members only to stop and mount ladders with such care, it’s as though he’s worried about being reprimanded for busting workplace health and safety protocols (all the while Scarlet Lodge members are bashing him with clubs).

Victor starts out with four points of both mental and physical health. Mental health is depleted by traumatic events in the story and by taking damage, while physical health is affected solely by how much of a beating Victor has taken. Pills are used to restore mental health, while physical health can be regained from bandages and first aid kits found throughout the environments. Better yet, power upgrades can be found at shrines in Lusst’ghaa that allow you to increase your health bar, weapon impact, sneaking ability, or mental strength. I split my upgrades into sneaking and mental strength. The latter allowed me to better decipher artefacts, uncovering new side stories. The upgrades also increased my mental health bar and granted additional points of replenished health from restoration items. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say the game is generous with pickups, you should be able to get through without much problem if rationing health items like you would in any survival horror game.

I had hoped the enhancements to sneaking would allow me to take a more passive route through the game, but this was not the case. Though the side stories were interesting, and the boost to mental health was welcome, health and power are really where you want to put your resources. Stealth is viable for the first part of the game, but by the final third you’ll often find yourself in inescapable combat. I still got through it in my weakened smarty-pants state, but in retrospect it would have been more enjoyable to forgo the early stealth sections in favor of a guns-blazing (knives-blazing? Do knives blaze?) approach. The game even has several boss battles, and sneaking or reading your way to victory isn’t an option there, so best to arm yourself accordingly. Regardless of your upgrades, Victor is given unlimited ammunition for the final boss, and combat becomes completely trivial, taking away any sense of tension or survival.

Victor also has one additional stat bar introduced roughly halfway through the game: Essence, which is only used in Lusst’ghaa for environmental manipulation. Harvested from glowing purple fungi, it serves to grant you psychic powers of a sort that can be used to repair broken bridges, illuminate light towers, and beckon creatures to follow you (a requirement for solving certain puzzles). It’s a neat concept, but wholly underutilized. The puzzles involving Essence are all very direct and usually only involve one step, requiring you to create a path of some kind. There was a lot of potential for multistep solutions here, but sadly most of these Essence challenges are entirely obvious and trivial. Fortunately, interpreting the clues, keys, and artefacts in Lusst’ghaa, trying to figure out what needs to be done, is like learning the basics of another language, and finding your way around feels highly rewarding in its own right.

A couple of puzzles, like a door with multiple locks in a section titled the Halls of Blood, did have me scratching my head, but for the most part the challenge isn’t much harder back in the real world. Most obstacles are variations of the lock and key formula, though there are also puzzles that feature dial rotation and item manipulation, including a clever one with a set of iron maiden doors that need to be opened in a specific order. Though Victor puts his antiquarian training to use in deciphering texts related to Lusst’ghaa in cinematics, the game never makes you feel like you’re harnessing any of his knowledge to solve puzzles, which is a waste.

The game also utilizes Quick Time Events (QTEs) of a sort. A spinning dial will appear in the center of the screen, prompting you to left-click when a pointer is overtop a highlighted section of the wheel. Most QTEs appear when Victor is attempting to use Essence, and failure here simply subtracts a bar from his reserve. If you lose all four bars, you’ll have to backtrack to a fungi source (usually somewhere near the obstacle you’re trying to overcome) and refill his gauge. The other circumstance in which a QTE may prompt is during scripted lovemaking sequences, where failure simply returns Victor to the previous stage of animation to try again. (Yeah, it sounds silly, but it’s a few steps above Indigo Prophecy’s sex minigame, so we’re making progress.)

Play areas are typically built to corral players forward – big enough to feel genuinely like city blocks, hotels, sex dungeons, etc. without being so big as to be in any real danger of getting lost. However, in one particularly long and intense sequence, the aforementioned Halls of Blood, you’re tasked with navigating a wide-open multistory complex, trying to find three keys. The halls are populated with numerous enemies, and for the first time your direction is not immediately clear, forcing you to figure out what puzzles need solving in which order even as danger lurks all around you. While I don’t have a problem with being asked to explore and make mistakes, especially in a horror game, being forced to endure long wait times to respawn only adds to the problem.

In fact, many aspects of Lust from Beyond summon similar feelings of frustration. For one, it is quite poorly optimized. I had to adjust the graphics settings numerous times before getting a stable frame rate. Compounding the matter, the game seemingly shuffled my settings at random at some point and caused everything to run quite choppily. I eventually got things sorted, but even then the load times between areas were atrocious, taking around two minutes on average. If this happened only between new areas (like moving in and out of Lusst’ghaa), I could understand. However, every time you die and get a game over, the load time simply to plop Victor back at the last checkpoint is just as long. During the aforementioned chase sequence, for example, where finding the right route can be tricky the first couple of times, having to wait so long between tries quickly becomes demoralizing.

Then there are the glitches. Though the game is quite liberal with checkpoints, they don’t always trigger as intended. In the Halls of Blood segment, upon finding the first clue needed to progress, I died a couple of times and had to start the sequence all over again. After waiting through the load screens enough times, I quit playing, coming back to try again the next night, only to find that I had magically been granted a checkpoint at the item pickup point (albeit alongside an enemy that had also failed to load the previous times). In one of the boss battles, you’re forced to outrun a lumbering cultist, luring him into taking environmental damage to stagger him, then unloading a few bullets/stabs while he is down. In my first attempt, the cultist just seemed to eat my shots without consequence. Again I left the game, came back the next night and lo and behold, I got him down after only a few rounds. These hiccups seriously damaged my faith in the game, as it made me constantly question whether I was doing something wrong or whether something simply hadn’t worked as intended.

Character movements and animations are stiff, and the way they often loop and repeat so often can further stifle immersion. Human (and humanoid) facial animations, or lack thereof, are hard to ignore as well, though many of the Scarlet Lodge and Cult of Ecstasy members wear masks, smartly hiding this limitation. Textures and lighting are nicely rendered, fortunately, and there are a number of effective jump scares waiting in the dark. The modeling of artefacts and sex toys (of which there are a lot) look quite good as well, and you can tell as much work went into building the world visually as did creating all the background lore.

The realm of Lusst’ghaa in particular is simply astounding to behold, giving off some great Dark Seed vibes, proudly displaying its Giger inspirations. The architecture resembles an exoskeleton, with tissue stretched over bone-like constructions, coiling tightly into crisscrossing hallways and soaring high into vaulted ceilings. It’s both organic and artificially constructed, with some areas looking entirely natural, almost like caves, with trees lit up by pale purple and blue hues through cracks in the ceiling, while others are perfectly symmetrical in their layout, featuring sculptures woven directly into the architecture itself. Though some of the textures meld and clip awkwardly with one and other, the thoughtful use of lighting goes a long way in masking these blips. The creatures that walk (or crawl) these halls are both frightening and pitiful to behold, though they don’t quite have that uniformity of design you’d see in Giger’s own artwork. Nevertheless, the overall effect here is very well developed, ultimately looking more biological than mechanical.

The real world looks good too, with light and shadow used to establish suitably creepy environments. The heavy red mist and dim light that cover the aforementioned Halls of Blood, for example, create an immensely tense atmosphere, while the run-down haunted house-esque décor in the manor, hotel, and secret dungeons give the game a wonderful Halloween-ish vibe. However, upon looking closer, Lust from Beyond’s roots as an independent game are a bit more evident here. Textures can become slightly repetitious, such as several of the paintings and sculptures repeating throughout the Cult of Ecstasy’s mansion, like Godward’s A Classical Beauty, Far Away Thoughts. This may seem like a nitpick, but considering the rich lore developed for the game, it seems silly to think of the cult just getting mass-produced IKEA prints to adorn their secret headquarters. (I bet interior design critiques like these are why I never get invited to those fancy Eyes Wide Shut parties).

As good as it looks from an artistic perspective, make no mistake: Lust from Beyond is gruesome. It’s not only bloody, it features just about every kind of bodily fluid that can be poured, sucked, dropped, or squirted. There is a censored mode, however, which prompts every time you start the game up, should you want to blur out the “gunk.” The game is also meant to be as erotic as it is horrific, with Victor able to engage in consensual sex (with male, female, and other humanoid creatures) at several points, contrasted against many others where his own consent is not an option. It would be unfair to categorize such scenes as porn, though they most definitely can be categorized as lewd. Still, the way the game showcases both the healing and potentially traumatic effects of sex is thoughtful, and shows how abuse can come in many forms.

The music is aptly eerie, supporting the action when necessary, though most of the time you’ll be skulking around in silence. The voice acting isn’t perfect, particularly from the main characters, with Victor, Lily, and Amanda all sounding a bit dull. But when the drama hits, the actors usually deliver. Austerlitz is wonderfully insane, and special mention goes out to Gianni Matragrano, who does a great job of portraying the stammering hero Johnathan. As with the story, I wasn’t overly impressed at the start but the performances came to grow on me.

Lust from Beyond was made primarily for a very specific kind of person, and I’ll admit that person is not me. I didn’t have to reach for the barf bag, but even though I consider myself something of a horror gaming veteran, I have never played something as extreme as this. So between its shock value, glitches and underutilized puzzle design, I had my fair share of frustrations with the game. Having said that, the story blossomed into something quite interesting and I was genuinely intrigued to see it through to the end. If you’re having doubts, there are two different standalone demos available, Prologue and Scarlet, to see if you have the stomach for the full game. Personally, I found Lusst’ghaa such a fascinating place that I’m tempted, perhaps against my better judgment, to go back and try it again with different choices. My eleven hours the first time through ultimately left me with mixed feelings, but I’m still thinking about it well after finishing, and that goes a long way toward validating this provocative horror experiment.

WHERE CAN I DOWNLOAD Lust from Beyond

Lust from Beyond is available at:

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Our Verdict:

Lust from Beyond tells a thoughtful, albeit unapologetically disturbing, story. Its puzzles won’t leave you stumped for long, its action and stealth aren’t particularly engaging, and a number of technical issues are sure to cause frustration, but if you have a strong stomach for this particular brand of erotic horror, the excellent world-building and grotesque imagery will reward those who see it through.

GAME INFO Lust from Beyond is an adventure game by Movie Games released in 2021 for PC. It has a Illustrated realism style, presented in Realtime 3D and is played in a Third-Person perspective.

The Good:

  • Far-fetched but ultimately well-written, involving narrative
  • Branching choices and RPG-style skill system offer a good amount of replayability
  • Great art and environmental design, especially in Lusst’ghaa
  • Some interesting and varied, though not overly complex, puzzles

The Bad:

  • Stealth and combat are too simplistic and unpredictable
  • Essence puzzles are underutilized
  • Poorly optimized and numerous technical glitches can stall progress

The Good:

  • Far-fetched but ultimately well-written, involving narrative
  • Branching choices and RPG-style skill system offer a good amount of replayability
  • Great art and environmental design, especially in Lusst’ghaa
  • Some interesting and varied, though not overly complex, puzzles

The Bad:

  • Stealth and combat are too simplistic and unpredictable
  • Essence puzzles are underutilized
  • Poorly optimized and numerous technical glitches can stall progress
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