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Opening Statement-

The introduction for Lust From Beyond is the perfect way to open up a PC game like this. It is a great test of your computer’s capabilities and your sanity’s as well. It starts by blasting you right into the highly-detailed world of “Lusst’ghaa” playing as one of the game’s characters named Amanda. As Amanda, you wander the dark realm reminiscent of what the father of Alien, HR Giger, would envision if he were still alive. The obvious homages don’t stop there as the Lovecraftian influence will also enter the fray with words made up of foreign tongues you’ll only hear in the world of Lust From Beyond. There is detailed lore surrounding this otherworldly pantheon of perverted deities weaving its way through the game’s plot.

This is a sex-fueled survival horror game on the most perverse scale and it lets you know that upfront during this engaging opening sequence with this character called Amanda. You will see penetration and a lot more as you progress through the game. As the introduction unfolds you’ll see yourself walking through almost vaginally-organic-looking doorways to enter other dimensions. This is what brings Amanda back from the realm of tentacles and otherworldly sights to a room in a mansion. You realize that she was after something called a “D’horn” which is an important item for this demon worshiping sex cult that she ranks in. It ends up looking like a squirmy creature that resembles a chest-burster from the Alien franchise when you finally see it in its current state. The “alien” creature is brought back with her as a tool showing a possible overlap between worlds which you will learn more about as the game progresses. This sums up the ritualistically surreal introduction to Lust From Beyond as humanly possible. Get ready for a wild ride!

Gameplay-

After the insanely dark introduction, the following chapters will reveal you’ll play another character to kick off the main plot. This is where Victor Holloway’s journey starts and the true darkness begins. This is also where I encountered my first real puzzle and where the game’s inventory system comes into play. For the puzzle, I had to combine elements of a fish, a woman, a horse,  a man, and other cryptic symbols to also resemble a dragon. This was showing just a taste of more perplexing puzzles to come. All to open up a box with a key in it that progresses the plot. The setting of the main character’s opening moments is the cozy confines of Vic Holloway’s workplace, an antique shop, connected to his abode. After a hard day of digging around for items in the shop for a customer’s order, this is done in a series of fetch quests for the player, Vic will want to spend some time with his girlfriend named Lily. Setting up the anniversary celebration for his love leads to another series of fetch quests that Lust From Beyond is mired with. You’ll be collecting a lot of stuff to get things done just to move the story forward in a threaded plot. A perturbed sex scene involving Lily calls the darkness out of Vic sending the twisted tale spiraling forward. That particular encounter induced a cinematic sequence where you watch Lily freak out on Vic before he is sent to a dark dream world to take on perverted puzzles.

Even though it is in the first-person perspective it is more in line with the current term “walking simulator” instead of anything you’d find in Call of Duty or Resident Evil where shooting things is the main focus. These are first-person games that tie you to the environment fueled by a character-driven plot and don’t really require you to shoot at things all the time. I didn’t see anything resembling actual combat until the beginning of Chapter 5 where you are actually urged to flee rather than fight. Unfortunately, this was also the part where the checkpoint system shows its slight flakiness here in the fifth chapter. It was a timed event where a puzzle involved finding a few matches to light some candles and a key on a time limit. This meant life or death if you didn’t find the items in time. If the brief time limit runs out an enemy would appear and attack Victor killing him instantly during this sordid scavenger hunt. So if you had trouble with this particular puzzle be prepared to start right at the part where the timer starts again during the frantic search to stay alive.

Gruesome ritual after gruesome ritual, things start to get visibly crazier which is right on track for the plot as Vic is sent to Lust’ghaa over and over again, he is on a mission. The more he dives into this world the more it deepens Vic’s involvement with this craziness, he’ll get entangled into a violent cult to add on top of the demon world he is regularly teleported to. It all has to do with what they are looking for and why they keep sending Vic back to Lusst’ghaa. This is all I will say without spoiling too much. By the time Chapter 8 rolls around you’ll have some company with you for the next visit to the disturbing yet “beautiful” world of Lust’ghaa.

The legend of the Seeing Ones is threaded along in this transitional tale of evil and lust. The more you progress the chapters the more revealing the plot becomes regarding what is going on with Vic Holloway’s journey involving Lusst’ghaa and everything in between. I’ll spare more spoilers for those reading this review that hasn’t played the game yet but let me just say that even Amanda is shocked at what she saw while chaperoning Vic through the chasms of Lusst’ghaa. Chapter 10 will spring under the Eden Theater to somewhere called “The Blood House” which is by far the most difficult part of the game thus far and reveals more about these violent sex cults. You’ll need to be on your survival horror toes to get through this part or at least look up what to do to get out of the blood house alive.

Settings and Display-

I zipped right to the options menu to tinker with the settings because the freedom of PC games allows for multiple levels of customization. This is as opposed to console gaming, the freedom to customize performance like updating video drivers for instance which will tweak your performance on your machine. A newer desktop PC can run it steadily with a modern processor and graphics chipset but you’ll definitely get some slight choppiness if you don’t have a pricey graphics card to help out. I knocked it down a few notches in terms of texture quality during my tinkering. Playing games that are graphically demanding allows for different methods of reaching your desired graphics setting even if you can’t hit the ceiling with maximum video options. I didn’t touch the audio settings as my wireless headphones did their duty with immersing me into the evil world of Lust’ghaa. Auditory immersion is encouraged by the developers themselves with a message as the game boots to play it with headphones, alone, and in the dark. I have an LED HD TV that doubles as my monitor in 720p connected to my desktop PC.

I started with a basic wireless optical mouse that was a little too snappy while using it to look around my surroundings. So I lowered the Mouse Sensitivity settings to “1”. The mouse sensitivity options allow total configuration which is important to the game’s controls. Using the Steam app, a PC video game service will allow you to connect a compatible controller to your PC to play the game. A back-lit gaming keyboard works wonders for a game that is designed to be played in the dark. Things roll smoother with a gaming mouse if you can get your hands on one like I eventually did. Throughout my playthrough, I made sure to update my graphics processor with up-to-date drivers. There was also a gameplay stability patch entitled The Explorer’s Update that was released during my playthrough.

My specs

OS Name: Microsoft Windows 10 Home

System Manufacturer: HP

Processor: AMD Ryzen 3 4300G with Radeon Graphics, 3800 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) Memory: 8 GB of RAM

Minimum Requirements

• OS: Windows 7 / 8 / 10.

• Processor: Intel Core i3 3.2 GHz, AMD Phenom II X4 955 - 4 Core, 3.2 GHz.

• Memory: 8 GB RAM.

• Graphics: Radeon R9 280 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 660.

• DirectX: Version 11.

• Storage: 10 GB available space.

• Sound Card: DirectX compatible.

My Final Thoughts-

I remember the first real mission was to corral cultists for a ritual orgy, the first fetch quest of many. Keep in mind you’re playing this game in the first-person perspective so you’ll be doing a lot of digging around in the universe for quest items to solve puzzles. This reinforces what gamers would call a “walking-sim”, just think of a first-person shooter game with hardly any shooting. As someone who jumped into this series for this iteration of the Lust Universe, this was all new to me. Lust From Beyond is actually a sequel to Lust For Darkness. There are also two episodes that count as a prelude to Lust From Beyond that was used to demonstrate the game before the initial full release in March 2021.

Back in the game, you’ll have to keep an eye out for small onscreen markers for quest-related items while taking in the enveloping biomes of surreal horror. This seems obviously distracting at times. The theme is a great way to hook in players that are down with this type of dark stuff but the number of rudimentary puzzles pulled me out at times. I was hoping for some combat to happen right out of the gate but since it is heavily reliant on a plot to move it along I can see how combat would have bogged things down a bit. Maybe some lesser demons to beat up in this Lhust-ghaa realm at the beginning with Amanda would have been good to hook me in but the more I played the game I began to understand this isn’t that type of fodder-slasher game, especially since your only weapon is a measly knife at first. There are all kinds of crazy things going on in Victor’s world and you’re getting a front-row seat for his nightmare. The Resident Evil games, a pioneering survival horror series, has recently taken on the first-person perspective in their titles. This is a keen effort in immersion in a genre that blossoms when throwing the player around in such a perspective. This works really well for being sucked into the psychotic horror that is Lust From Beyond.

You wouldn’t normally see these dark erotic tones in the console ( note: There is a rated M version planned for consoles) gaming space because of the strict standards of the ESRB rating system. The highest rating a game can receive in that rating scale is AO or Adults Only to be exact. This is a death sentence if you’re trying to market your game in the mainstream world of video games. Like the world of Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony. This is exactly why there is an M-Rated version of the game planned for consoles with toned-down elements regarding the obvious hardcore depictions of sex. In the liberated world of PC gaming, portals can open up to darkly erotic worlds like Lust From Beyond’s where censorship won’t get in the way. Whereas an adult you can envelop yourself in the uncensored mode away from the clutches of any commercial rating system. They even offer a censored mode for more sensible tastes on the very same PC version. Consider this a required gaming journey if you are an adult and want to spend time with a game inspired by classic survival horror games, but taken a XXX step beyond. This rewarding experience from Movie Games is a gift for daring audiences that want to see worlds not meant for the eyes of the meek. Even with puzzles that felt like roadblocks at times, I had to see what happened next as I pressed on this Recommended video game that needs to be experienced at least once.