I just purchased this game not too long ago because I thought it looked interesting. The back of the box description made it sound as though you’d be investigating crime scenes and such which really intrigued me. The game itself wasn’t like I thought it would be from that description. It was less crime investigation and more supernatural investigation. Let me get more into this so you’ll understand.
OK, so to get into this investigation set up, the dual screen’s are copies of each other except the top screen is in a sense looking into a shadow world. It reminded me of when Frodo put on the ring in the LotR’s movies because the upper screen is black and white and wavy. Now if you're just investigating a "crime scene", you’ll see colored orbs on the upper screen. Then you will use your characters power which is called "sigma" which allows him to see a different plain and pull trace memories from the scene. The memories are the colored orbs. Once in Sigma mode you basically look at the upper screen to see where the orbs are. Then on the bottom screen scratch away the real world to reveal the shadow world, kind of like a lottery ticket, except your prize is a memory of what happened there. If you're pulling memories from a person you don’t see them in the top screen. They move around the body, so you can use a simple pulse radar setup to find out where they are then switch over to search mode and start scratching away and try and chase them down. They look a bit like worms. Once you find them you press on them and they flash red, enough damage and you pull the bad memory out.
These memories are called Shinen and basically everybody has them from what I understood, but if someone comes into contact with this disease/parasite called silent it warps their Shinen making them either violent or suicidal and that’s where the premise of the game comes into play. You must save the town from this "Silent" and these corrupted Shinen and people being overcome by the corrupted Shinen. It’s an extremely hard game to describe. I’m not even going to try to explain what it’s like trying to fight inside the minds of people infected with Silent, it’s simple yet hard to explain.
When I first started to play Lux-Pain I was very confused. I hadn’t read the instructions (I never do) so I really wasn’t sure what to do, but I easily figured it out and got into the swing of things and quickly became addicted and couldn’t put the game down. The storyline quickly engulfs you and you start to actually feel for the characters. At one point a certain event happens that actually shocked me and nearly made me jump from my seat, and yes I was yelling at my DS at times. Not out of frustration, but either cheering for the characters or telling them to not go to certain places. I found this game to be a great title that snuck out under the radar and I myself may have missed if it wasn’t for the anime characters on the cover. I’m a chump for anime characters in games. One downside to the game is the translation issues. There is some major translation flaws, yet they don’t make the game unplayable, actually far from it. They are more humorous in the fact that the translator was that stupid. A female character in the game, Mako, major character, female cop, half the time she gets referred to as a he, the other half a she. Like I said, it’s kind of humorous and it’s not like she’s androgynous looking - she’s obviously a female.
Since I mentioned anime several times in the review let me discuss the graphics a bit. The characters and backgrounds are done superbly yet, as with nearly all story based anime games, they are all still shots. If you are talking with one character, they will be large and centered on the screen. If a second character enters the scene, the first character will disappear and reappear with the second character both off to the sides. The same is done if there are multiple characters in a conversation. The characters are brightly colored and sharp and stand out greatly which is nice. You even have the option of hitting a certain button to make the text go away so you can see all of the characters and the scene they are in. Even though they are bright and pop out, it isn't so much so that it draws totally away from the backgrounds. The backgrounds are all of course prerendered images. Once again it's mainly a story driven game as opposed to an action game, but you can see in the screenshots that they are all done very well. Each character is very unique, making it easy to tell them apart, save for the side characters such as say Policeman 1, Policeman 2, etc who don't have names and are identical. Alongside the visuals you have the audio which is done equally as well. The intense scenes have an intense musical score, the dark scenes have the perfect dark ambiance to them, and of course the more happy, upbeat scenes bring with them more happy, upbeat music. As with most of this game, it is done pretty solidly aside from the few things I pointed out - mainly the one character's gender swapping in translation.
