Quick Hands on with Lux Pain

Down at Marvelous’ booth there were a handful of stations for Lux Pain and I was the only one who stood up to try the demo. Let me start by saying Lux Pain is a text adventure, extremely heavy text adventure game. I jumped into a middle of an episode and fell right into gameplay. The main character, Saijo, arm glows with a tattoo and his golden eye comes out. All of the sudden the top DS screen turns into a photo negative and you need to “erase” the color picture on the bottom screen by scratching it away with the stylus to uncover glowing orbs. Once you find the orbs you can tap on them and Saijo goes into this introspective mode where he muses about the meaning behind the information. Text rapidly flies around and blends into the screen like it was an advanced powerpoint presentation.

When I was playing the short demo I was kind of confused where the difficulty was because it felt like you could scratch forever without any penalty. I was told that later levels have a limit that forces the player to scan carefully rather than scratch randomly.

I have a bad feeling Lux Pain is going to be referred to as a Time Hollow clone or “the other text adventure game at TGS on the DS.” The problem is Lux Pain, Killaware’s first game is getting eclipsed by the media blitz of Time Hollow.