Lust from Beyond Ranking: A
…And now for something completely different.
This game…rather, this series…I don’t really have a handle on how I feel about it. Thinking about it brings up equal parts admiration, sickness, and sorrow. Let me start at the beginning.
The Lust series is a Lovecraftian-esque series. Here, instead of cosmic horror gods, we have cosmic lust gods. There’s an alien dimension called Lusst’ghaa, in which its denizens experience constant, eternal orgasms. How this is possible is beyond me – they must operate on completely different neurobiology, since the human brain is wired to tamp down pleasure after extended exposure to it. This has the effect of constantly pushing us to progress, since we need to in order to experience new pleasure. One might also consider this in a philosophical, rather than biological, light: if sexual pleasure (or any pleasure) is constant, then it ceases to be pleasure and is simply the baseline normal.
…where was I? Ah yes. In Lust for Darkness, you begin play as Amanda Moon, who has just been kidnapped and thrown into the base for a sex cult devoted to Lusst’ghaa. This cult, the Cult of Ecstasy, wants to travel to Lusst’ghaa to experience that eternal, constant orgasm. The leader of the Cult begins the game by raping Amanda.
Right off the bat this is incredibly disturbing. One might think, as I did, “what the hell is with starting a game like that or even having this in your game?” One might also think, as I did, “how many games have the daring to start a game like that or touch this sort of topic?”
Out of…morbid curiosity? I kept looking up the game and watched a Let’s Play. The rest of Lust for Darkness takes place a year afterward. Amanda’s still missing and her husband, Jonathan, receives a letter from her telling him where she is – the base of the Cult of Ecstasy – and asking him to go save her. You play as Jonathan, infiltrate the base, and free Amanda. Amanda sets fire to the house and you go home. She then reveals that her year-long stay at the Cult of Ecstasy has indoctrinated her in the ways of the Cult – she’s now hyper-sexualized and wants to go to Lusst’ghaa. Okay, well that’s also unsettling.
Lust from Beyond is the sequel to Lust for Darkness. Amanda is now the leader of the Cult of Ecstasy. She broke her husband with sex and Jonathan now serves her in the Cult. Between the first and second games, Amanda spent a long time in Lusst’ghaa. She has the power to open portals from Earth to Lusst’ghaa, a power unique to her, and she ends up understanding the alien dimension better than anyone else does.
Long story short: a long time ago, Lusst’ghaa was a normal world with normal people. The king decided that the best thing for his people was to transform them into beings that had no consciousness and only experienced lust and orgasm. From here he became known as the Lustful God. Lusst’ghaa then fell into deep ruin, either (1) because you can’t run a society if everyone’s a mindless lust-monster, (2) because some higher-up gods struck Lusst’ghaa with dimensional cancer, or both. Regardless of the reason, the Lustful God decided to leave Lusst’ghaa and transform other worlds into lands of eternal ecstasy. But those higher-up gods didn’t like that, so they imprisoned him in Lusst’ghaa. The Lustful God responded by psychically projecting “HELP ME” messages across the dimensions. In particular, some people on Earth were able to hear the call, but they didn’t understand it – all they knew was they were getting freaky visions of some alien, incomprehensible world. These people are known as Seeing. As you can probably guess, Amanda is a Seeing.
In Lust from Beyond, you play as a guy named Victor, who is also a Seeing. He struggles with his visions and the game follows him as he learns about Lusst’ghaa. I’ll skip a lot of details, but Amanda inducts him into the Cult by, as the player eventually finds, manipulating the hell out of him. For reasons I won’t really get into here, Victor is the only one who can actually open the Lustful God’s prison, so Amanda tries to manipulate him into doing so. Freeing the Lustful God would then turn Earth into another land of eternal ecstasy, with all humans becoming mindless and horny and constantly orgasming.
Okay. Let’s stop here for a bit. The first thing that really bothers me is Amanda’s plot. This poor woman had Seeing visions ever since she was born, and Amanda is the most powerful Seeing in the world, so her visions are especially intense. This is why she was kidnapped and brought into the Cult in the first place. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t ask for this.
And in the end, she became just like her abductors. The guy who raped her and forcefully aborted her child and made her give birth to his child. That doesn’t sit well with me at all. Because this part of her story arc isn’t some result of fiction. This sort of thing could happen in reality. And the idea horrifies me.
If Amanda frees the Lustful God, she’s destroying all of humanity. Our consciousness. Our ability to think. Our ability to feel. Our accomplishments. Our potential. All of that, gone, washed away in lust. And if she doesn’t? The Lustful God will just continue projecting his SOS message, ensuring some other Seeing in the future inherits Amanda’s fate.
So this entire plot. This entire, horrifically fucked up plot, is meaningless. The Lustful God is apathetically using humans so he can get out of jail. And he will eventually succeed. What we see on the way there – broken marriages and relationships, ruined lives, death, violation – they’re nothing in the grand scheme of what this guy wants and does. That’s…well, it’s very Lovecraftian. Lovecraftian stories rarely have happy endings. They’re usually like, “this guy learns of eldritch horrors and goes insane, the end.” They revolve around the idea that at the cosmic scale, humanity means nothing.
This is a double-downer ending. And I just…I feel really, really sorry for Amanda.
That said…I can’t decrease a game’s rank just because the plot viscerally disturbs me. Well, I can, but it feels unfair. And I do think the developers did something unique. Really, how many developers make a game with this sort of setting? A setting steeped in eroticism? Where I am, America, is terrified of sex. You can make a game here with violent gore and it’ll get a softer rating compared to if your game has sexual content. Remember in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where there was some hidden sex scene? That made the news. There was a giant controversy over that, bigger than a game that, you know, allows you to be a super-criminal murdering pedestrians, stealing cars, robbing banks, etc. Oh, and if somehow my description sounds like the game’s just a porn simulator, it’s not, oh, not by a long shot…which drives home the point that this game is so unique – a game whose central theme involves lust, but isn’t just a porno in game form.
And though I wrote at length about how disturbing the plot was to me, that’s the point. The game’s erotic horror. It’s purposefully disturbing on multiple levels. So as much as I wanted to cry and throw up…the game did exactly what it set out to do.
I give this game and its indie developer team an A for bold, unflinching courage; for visceral, disturbing horror; and for true, creative uniqueness.
…And now for something completely different.
This game…rather, this series…I don’t really have a handle on how I feel about it. Thinking about it brings up equal parts admiration, sickness, and sorrow. Let me start at the beginning.
The Lust series is a Lovecraftian-esque series. Here, instead of cosmic horror gods, we have cosmic lust gods. There’s an alien dimension called Lusst’ghaa, in which its denizens experience constant, eternal orgasms. How this is possible is beyond me – they must operate on completely different neurobiology, since the human brain is wired to tamp down pleasure after extended exposure to it. This has the effect of constantly pushing us to progress, since we need to in order to experience new pleasure. One might also consider this in a philosophical, rather than biological, light: if sexual pleasure (or any pleasure) is constant, then it ceases to be pleasure and is simply the baseline normal.
…where was I? Ah yes. In Lust for Darkness, you begin play as Amanda Moon, who has just been kidnapped and thrown into the base for a sex cult devoted to Lusst’ghaa. This cult, the Cult of Ecstasy, wants to travel to Lusst’ghaa to experience that eternal, constant orgasm. The leader of the Cult begins the game by raping Amanda.
Right off the bat this is incredibly disturbing. One might think, as I did, “what the hell is with starting a game like that or even having this in your game?” One might also think, as I did, “how many games have the daring to start a game like that or touch this sort of topic?”
Out of…morbid curiosity? I kept looking up the game and watched a Let’s Play. The rest of Lust for Darkness takes place a year afterward. Amanda’s still missing and her husband, Jonathan, receives a letter from her telling him where she is – the base of the Cult of Ecstasy – and asking him to go save her. You play as Jonathan, infiltrate the base, and free Amanda. Amanda sets fire to the house and you go home. She then reveals that her year-long stay at the Cult of Ecstasy has indoctrinated her in the ways of the Cult – she’s now hyper-sexualized and wants to go to Lusst’ghaa. Okay, well that’s also unsettling.
Lust from Beyond is the sequel to Lust for Darkness. Amanda is now the leader of the Cult of Ecstasy. She broke her husband with sex and Jonathan now serves her in the Cult. Between the first and second games, Amanda spent a long time in Lusst’ghaa. She has the power to open portals from Earth to Lusst’ghaa, a power unique to her, and she ends up understanding the alien dimension better than anyone else does.
Long story short: a long time ago, Lusst’ghaa was a normal world with normal people. The king decided that the best thing for his people was to transform them into beings that had no consciousness and only experienced lust and orgasm. From here he became known as the Lustful God. Lusst’ghaa then fell into deep ruin, either (1) because you can’t run a society if everyone’s a mindless lust-monster, (2) because some higher-up gods struck Lusst’ghaa with dimensional cancer, or both. Regardless of the reason, the Lustful God decided to leave Lusst’ghaa and transform other worlds into lands of eternal ecstasy. But those higher-up gods didn’t like that, so they imprisoned him in Lusst’ghaa. The Lustful God responded by psychically projecting “HELP ME” messages across the dimensions. In particular, some people on Earth were able to hear the call, but they didn’t understand it – all they knew was they were getting freaky visions of some alien, incomprehensible world. These people are known as Seeing. As you can probably guess, Amanda is a Seeing.
In Lust from Beyond, you play as a guy named Victor, who is also a Seeing. He struggles with his visions and the game follows him as he learns about Lusst’ghaa. I’ll skip a lot of details, but Amanda inducts him into the Cult by, as the player eventually finds, manipulating the hell out of him. For reasons I won’t really get into here, Victor is the only one who can actually open the Lustful God’s prison, so Amanda tries to manipulate him into doing so. Freeing the Lustful God would then turn Earth into another land of eternal ecstasy, with all humans becoming mindless and horny and constantly orgasming.
Okay. Let’s stop here for a bit. The first thing that really bothers me is Amanda’s plot. This poor woman had Seeing visions ever since she was born, and Amanda is the most powerful Seeing in the world, so her visions are especially intense. This is why she was kidnapped and brought into the Cult in the first place. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t ask for this.
And in the end, she became just like her abductors. The guy who raped her and forcefully aborted her child and made her give birth to his child. That doesn’t sit well with me at all. Because this part of her story arc isn’t some result of fiction. This sort of thing could happen in reality. And the idea horrifies me.
If Amanda frees the Lustful God, she’s destroying all of humanity. Our consciousness. Our ability to think. Our ability to feel. Our accomplishments. Our potential. All of that, gone, washed away in lust. And if she doesn’t? The Lustful God will just continue projecting his SOS message, ensuring some other Seeing in the future inherits Amanda’s fate.
So this entire plot. This entire, horrifically fucked up plot, is meaningless. The Lustful God is apathetically using humans so he can get out of jail. And he will eventually succeed. What we see on the way there – broken marriages and relationships, ruined lives, death, violation – they’re nothing in the grand scheme of what this guy wants and does. That’s…well, it’s very Lovecraftian. Lovecraftian stories rarely have happy endings. They’re usually like, “this guy learns of eldritch horrors and goes insane, the end.” They revolve around the idea that at the cosmic scale, humanity means nothing.
This is a double-downer ending. And I just…I feel really, really sorry for Amanda.
That said…I can’t decrease a game’s rank just because the plot viscerally disturbs me. Well, I can, but it feels unfair. And I do think the developers did something unique. Really, how many developers make a game with this sort of setting? A setting steeped in eroticism? Where I am, America, is terrified of sex. You can make a game here with violent gore and it’ll get a softer rating compared to if your game has sexual content. Remember in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where there was some hidden sex scene? That made the news. There was a giant controversy over that, bigger than a game that, you know, allows you to be a super-criminal murdering pedestrians, stealing cars, robbing banks, etc. Oh, and if somehow my description sounds like the game’s just a porn simulator, it’s not, oh, not by a long shot…which drives home the point that this game is so unique – a game whose central theme involves lust, but isn’t just a porno in game form.
And though I wrote at length about how disturbing the plot was to me, that’s the point. The game’s erotic horror. It’s purposefully disturbing on multiple levels. So as much as I wanted to cry and throw up…the game did exactly what it set out to do.
I give this game and its indie developer team an A for bold, unflinching courage; for visceral, disturbing horror; and for true, creative uniqueness.