Investigate your surroundings and gather hints by conversing with characters in the game
Explore the massive world of Kisaragi City
Use your stylus to conduct autopsies of Silent worms found throughout the game
Psychic Powers enable you to save potential victims from Silent
Use your stylus to find the parasite before it reaches the heart of the victim

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Product Description
Lux-Pain is set in historical Kisaragi City, a town plagued by mysteries from small mishaps to murders. It seems "Silent", a worm born through hate and sadness, has infected humans and forced them to commit atrocious crimes. The hero's parents are victims of such crimes. To avenge his parents, Atsuki goes through a dangerous operation to acquire Lux-Pain in his left arm, a power so strong that his left eye turns golden when using it to seek and destroy Silent for good.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 9 reviews)

A Good Idea, but Problems Abound by Motley

3 Stars
October 23, 2009
STORY- You begin the game as Atsuki Saijo, a young member of the group named FORT and the person in charge of rooting out an infection called Silent. He's traveled to the town of Kisaragi in order to track down the perpetrator of several crimes as well as a notorious Silent infectee. While investigating, Atsuki has to pose as a normal high school student and glean information from his peers. The story, while sounding simple enough at first, becomes more confusing and difficult to wade through as time goes on. It doesn't help that the game comes with multiple endings; meaning if you want the full picture you're going to have to play through it multiple times. The plot isn't what I would call 'bad', but it certainly tries to mash too many themes together. The tone of the story seemed to be a horror story/mystery at the start, but it quickly changed to one of high school fluff and drama. The mixture didn't sit very well with me, especially since you could find yourself looking at a suicide one minute and then discussing cakes the next. GAMEPLAY- As it's known as a 'visual novel', the gameplay in Lux-Pain mainly consists of sifting through mountains of text while running around town, talking to different people. The game tries to give you the illusion that you're free to go where you want after school, but that's really all it is: an illusion. There are always certain places where you won't be able to go. And really, there's almost no strategy involved in searching the town. All you have to do is check the available areas. before hitting the hay at Atsuki's house. Lux-Pain really holds your hand throughout the entire course of the game, and rarely lets you have control of your own actions. It's certainly possible to choose which order you want to do things in, but it almost never makes a difference. At school and around town, you'll often find people to talk to, and they'll just rattle off strings of dialogue while you stand around saying nothing. There are a few times here and there when you'll get to navigate a bland and uninteresting dialogue tree, but other than that, Atsuki is completely quiet. It's nice that there were so many people around town to talk to, but I often got the feeling that they were talking at me, not with me. A little more freedom of choice would have helped the game a whole lot. You can never really choose anything to say or do: in fact, the mystery basically solves itself for you. Occasionally, when talking with people, Atsuki will notice a worm inside someone and begin using Sigma to detect it. It's a bit like a simple minigame; all you have to do is scratch away at the screen and then hold the stylus over the worm until it's gone. There's really not much skill involved with it. Once that's done, a term will appear. The term is generally just a few words which will appear to have almost no meaning at first. Sometimes the terms are relevant to the mystery, but sometimes they're completely inane. At the start of the game, I was impressed with the way the thoughts of the killer and his victims presented themselves: there was a sense of disjointedness, and above all, tension and fear. But the majority of other people's thoughts are a good deal less impressive. I remember that near the start of the game, I had to scan Rui Yamase and tap on a worm. The term showed up, and her thoughts were about...how much she liked her school? It was, quite simply, useless information. Rui's love of school was never vital information, and it didn't provide me with any real insight into anything either. That wasn't the only time it happened. There were several other occasions where the thoughts of the person had nothing to do with the investigation at all. Sometimes, phrases are mentioned and then never brought up again. Every now and again, you'll encounter a larger Silent inside of someone, and then you have to go through Lux-Pain's equivalent of a boss battle. These sequences are rarely anything more challenging than simply tapping on the touch screen, though. There's almost no other interactivity with the touch screen, except for the moments when you have to scribble madly at the screen in order to uncover a worm. Most of the time, due to the enormous amounts of text, you'll simply be mashing the 'a' button like your life depends on it. One of the many things that rubbed me the wrong way about Lux-Pain was the fact that I constantly had to refer back to the manual to remind myself what was going on. At the beginning of the story, the game simply dumps you into the overworld map without so much as a vague explanation of the menu system. This lack of a tutorial can actually severely affect gameplay. Case in point: certain events are limited-time-only and expire if you don't see to them right away. Natsuki, one of Atsuki's allies from FORT, has a very useful scanning ability which lets you know how much time you have to witness the event before it's lost forever. Unfortunately, the game neglects to inform you of this. In fact, I didn't even realize that events had time limits until I missed one or two of them. Missing important cutscenes means that you will most likely not get the 'best' ending on your first playthrough. There's an incredible amount of information that the game simply doesn't tell you. Instead, you'll have to pick up your manual (assuming you still own it) and read through it just to figure out what in the blue blazes you're supposed to be doing. That's the majority of Lux-Pain's gameplay, in a nutshell. Visit places at school and around town, talk to people, listen to their inane pschyobabble, repeat. It's not 'bad', it's just boring. Half the time you'll have no idea what your peers or fellow townsfolk are talking or thinking about, and trying to shovel through massive clots of pointless dialogue only makes the problem worse. VISUALS, CHARACTERS, AUDIO AND WRITING- Lux-Pain is a visual novel, and as such, usually consists of simple static images on an unmoving background. Character sprites usually have a few different emotions, all of which look decent and get the point across. It's a slick-looking game, and will most likely appeal to an audience who enjoys anime and manga (it closely resembles some of the more recent Persona games, in case a frame of reference is needed). There are quite a few different characters and animations packed into the game, which is something I'll praise Lux-Pain for. The music was decent, but nothing struck me as being particularly memorable. It was standard fare and served mainly as background noise to whatever else was going on. As mentioned before, there are tons of characters in Lux-Pain. Really, there are. You'll encounter a variety of people from day to day, some of which may end up being key parts of your investigation. The game manages to flesh out most of your schoolmates fairly well. But there's one glaringly obvious problem that rubbed me the wrong way: I didn't connect at all with Atsuki. Let's sum things up--Atsuki an orphan whose parents and sister were killed. He's supposedly quite attractive, but he broods a lot and rarely says anything throughout the course of the game. He shows little emotion or reaction to anything his friends do or say. How many of these heroes have I seen before? His type is a dime-a-dozen. It's not as though I like or disliked him, it's as though he just never bothered to show up on the day when they were handing out personalities. My final, and possibly most infuriating problem with Lux-Pain is the translation and localization issues. To put it frankly, the game is absolutely filled with grammar, punctuation and spelling errors. This is a text-based game, in which virtually all you do is read. They have no excuse for screwing it up. Sometimes, I found myself getting lost in the midst of conversations because the way the characters talked was so obtuse and irregular. The dialogue is by no means unintelligible, but it's very distracting to try and pay attention to a serious scene when my eye keeps getting stuck on missing punctuation marks. Sometimes, usually during more important scenes, a voiceover will begin. The voice acting is quite good; I have no complaints with it. So what's the matter? The text and the voice sometimes don't match. It's confusing, frustrating, and above all, it makes you wonder who proof-read this game. It really should have been cleaned up more before being released to the consumers. If you are a stickler for proper grammar and spelling, beware. CONCLUSION- Lux-Pain could have been a great game. The concept of exploring a town, hunting down a supernatural mental virus and uncovering a sinister plot sounds awesome. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations. The lack of tutorials, repetitive nature of gameplay, convoluted story and flawed dialogue will drive many gamers into either a state of severe boredom or a one of teeth-gnashing insanity. Although I had a decent time with it, I can't really recommend it.The whole thing left a rather bad taste in my mouth, because it could have been great: only it wasn't.

Worst translation in years by Andrew Koch

2 Stars
October 04, 2009
While the game is interesting both from a visual standpoint and a plot standpoint, the horrible translation ends up killing the enjoyment. Randomly misspelled words, a voice dialogue that doesn't even remotely follow the text dialogue, and some completely inappropriate syntax make it extremely annoying to play. Wait a year or two and hopefully they'll release a version of the game that actually went through a quality control department first.

Too much of a pain to go through editing... by Patricia D. McCoy (Xenia, Ohio United States)

3 Stars
July 04, 2009
Lux Pain is a uniquely dark and gothic text based adventure with minimal repetitive mini games (two to be exact). That being said it has issues. Lots of issues! The two minigames can be fun, but are a bit simplistic for a game this dark. Either your scratching through people to find and eliminate worms, or you're playing "pop the bubbles before they burst". It's hard to mess them up even intentionally, and I was hoping for more plot/thought driven puzzles to be mixed in. There is no thought involved in getting through this game. Areas you need to go to are always highlighted, helping to avoid needless wandering but also any bit of thought on where to go. There can be several highlighted areas at once but after one you can just go to the next with little to no penalty. Text is very very long, and when you combine that with localization issues what you end up with is long sprawls of people talking about events you get the gist of but not a lot of details. After a while it will start to put you to sleep. To make things worse your response options to the average bit of dialog go like this: 1. Caring answer 2. Snarky answer Sometimes there's a third option but it doesn't really add anything. A saving grace at least is that somehow the vocal track always makes more sense then the text, so if you're lost try to stop reading and just listen to the dialog. Unfortunately not all parts are voiced. Odd as it is the game is still kind of fun which is why I gave it a 3 but on a 1-10 scale it's probably a 5. I would definitely give this a try before you buy it. Best for people that have played other import games and text-based adventures, most likely NOT for young kids.

Minus the bad grammar it was fun by C. Hunt (New England)

3 Stars
May 25, 2009
Well I was exited to see a Japanese game in English. The game play was fun, a little repetitive but fun. What is keeping me from giving it a full 5 stars is the voices matching the subtitle...I could not stand that...also they mixed up a lot of pronouns and had some ridiculous typing errors..that is what mainly angered me because if you are going to release a piece of work...well fix stuff that is really noticeable like that first! Other than that, I would recommend the game I like the story line and it is fun.

A Game Where You Can Bond With the Characters! by E. Smith

5 Stars
May 12, 2009
I bought Lux Pain when it first came out. Let me tell you, the game is truly worth it for those who love mystery games. This is not an action game and those who don't like reading text shouldn't be playing this game and ranting about how poorly written it is. I have beaten this game five times, I can evaluate the game. Don't read if you don't want spoilers! Story: A 98.74 (It really is a masterpiece. It's been my dream to play a game where a guy in his teens infiltrates a high school to solve a case only to end up befriending people and falling in love with whomever only to be depressed when he has to leave them. If Atsuki didn't obey FORT's orders, he might be able to enjoy a regular high school life.) Gameplay: C 75.10 (As much as I hate to admit it but the game was too easy. Even Graham who is the final boss was too easy. The battle system isn't hard. The problem is not knowing where you have to go. If you're too rash and you go to the destination they tell you without visiting other places, you'll miss important things like saving Honoka when she is infected by Silent.) Music: A 96.00 (Whenever they play a music piece, it sets the feel of the scene. Whenever they play that embarrassing music, you know something hilarious or humiliating happens. When they play the dark music, you know something bad happened and when sad music is played, you know that people are mourning for someone or depressed.) Art: A 93.39 (It's drawn anime style but that's good! That's what makes this game unique!) Dialogue: D+ and C- on some occasions rounded to 69.45 (There were so many grammatical errors in the game. Names were spelled wrong, some letters were capitalized and some letters were lower cased. There were no spaces between words on many occasions. Numbers were not spelled out. The game tended to use the & symbol instead of the word and. The game also has a tendency of calling Atsuki a she or mixing up who they were talking about. When they are voice acting, they usually say something completely different from the text. At the beginning, Natsuki was talking about America but the dialogue said it was Japan.) Voice Acting: B 83.16 (I like certain voice actors but Natsuki's voice actor was the most annoying of them all.) Characters: A+++ 100 (I don't think there is such a rank. However, you got to love the character development. Overall: B+ 87.9 was the final score on my calculator (Not bad really! The game lost points in the dialogue mainly.) DO NOT LISTEN TO THE NEGATIVE RANTS! They have not played the game fully! I played the game five times so I would know. Also, those who give negative reviews are guys who prefer action or talking. They have no patience with the game so they are terrible at rating games. That is my rant is done. I hope a lot of people get Lux Pain now and appreciate it.

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