REVIEW : Lust from Beyond: Scarlet (PC)
A horror play based on lust looks like a controversial proposition. True, we incorporate nudity and intimacy with vulnerability a keyword of endurance horror design but there is a difference between naked lust and emotional exposure. A further difficulty is that while fear has common touchstones, lust leads to be pretty specific. To triumphantly fuse these into an erotic-grotesque aesthetic that goes for more than a few people is a complicated profession, and it’s one that Lust From Beyond: Scarlet doesn’t pull off.
I feel constrained to place a trigger warning here, as the content of the play is truly disrupting thanks to incorporating acts of brutality and acts of questionable or non-consent, and this is a great time to stop reading the review for those who find this kind of stuff distressing.
Scarlet is a free intro for the future Lust From Beyond, meant to premiere some of the characters and ideas that will arrive in the main game. It follows a fairly familiar first-person horror template, in that its hero Alan needs to search areas while collecting keys, tools and suchlike while unlocking more doors before getting to the truly scary moments.
Scarlet tried to assure me that things were frightening from the source. The sound design is overwrought, with eerie sounds kicking in almost instantly and stingers that hit before the scary visual has even registered. A little more control would have gone a long way in stopping me from tuning out the soundtrack.
In truth, there’s little going on at first. Alan enters a putatively abandoned theatre to tryst with what is really a Tinder match. This part of Scarlet was very much a walking simulator, except there was a mysterious insistence on using mouse movements rather than solely clicking to do things like open gateways or chests. As Scarlet requires a full physics model, this feels like a simulation.
Of course, as this is a horror game, the Tinder-style hookup does not go well and Alan ends up in the clutches of a weird cult that requires to send him to a place called Lusst’ghaa by getting him high and then getting him laid. Yes, this involves QTE-driven sex scenes.
At this point, I couldn’t quite understand what the devs were going for. One scene involves Alan penetrating a woman who has quite clearly been brutalized, with still-bleeding words carved into her back. The moment disgusted me in itself and shocked me with Alan specifically, who is clearly, inexplicably aroused during it. Was this intended to be sensual? If so it failed, but if it was intended to be horrifying, I was terrified at everyone involved, including the “hero”. Worse, the first-person view made me part of the picture.
In this time and others, Scarlet‘s depiction and interpretation of lust are very short and male-oriented. Whether the female associates are willing, compelled, or simply drugged up like Alan isn’t clear, but what’s apparent is that their faces, bodies and adventures are useless the women are just holes.
The aesthetic of these sensual confrontations fails, but the scheme works. Alan ends up in Lusst’ghaa, a kind of generically Giger-esque hellscape that looks decidedly unsexy except perhaps to those who like tentacle hentai. Here Scarlet also offers a simple set of stealth technicians that must be used to bypass monstrous opponents, none of which appears related to the “lust” theme. These mechanics are also at play in Alan’s struggles to escape the cult.
The narrative is too short to say more about it, except that its climax connects to an absurd accident and it ends in an act of blatant stupidity. Scarlet‘s real purpose, however, is not to tell a narrative of its own but to introduce the story of another, more generous game.
REVIEW : Dungeons & Bombs (PS4)
