Egypt Frontiers - PC Preview

Egypt Frontiers by developer FreeMind S.A. and publisher PlayWay S.A.—PC(Steam) preview written by Valerie with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

---

Freemind S.A. has extended their building simulation games (another reviewed here) into the country of Egypt where a fellow author and myself would love to visit. Welcome to Egypt Frontiers where you, a master builder, help supervise and build Egyptian temples and monuments. Other than the jerky start I had with the first cinematic when you arrive on site, it was looking promising, but as my preview spills out you'll find a few flaws in both the graphics and the gameplay. As this game progresses through Early Access, I hope my small contributions help with the tuning up of the game.

I really enjoyed Egypt Frontiers with the setting, music, and projects you have to work on. However, the graphics in some portions of the game came up short. Like in this image below, the workers seem to be in the ground underneath the roadway you are making for transporting of brick to the next location. The help files have a couple of spelling mistakes, but the instructions are clear with visuals. There are also a couple of spelling mistakes in the dialogue screens and in the menus.

Since Egypt Frontiers is still in Early Access, there is a lot of room for improving, fixing, and adding to the game. I am excited to see what comes up in the coming months. So far, I am also enjoying the gameplay and the music which makes me feel like I'm riding a camel, however I didn't see a single one during gameplay. A couple showed up in one of those transition screens that gives you information of Ancient Egyptian culture though! 

In Egypt Frontiers you arrive at the pier of Giza where the Vizier instructs you on where to go and what to do. In Ancient Egyptian fashion you are given the tools to construct your own home, housing for workers, monuments, temples and the final Egyptian landmark. With each of the projects you are given recipes to both find and harvest the resources needed to make the tools and items required for that particular quest. I was lost a few times as to where to place things or where to go.

Your most important tool is the triangle you have to make as your first quest. After the triangle is made you equip it to your hotbar. It calls up all the things you can build with a simple left-click of your mouse. The object you have to build from your selection is in a green ghost image that you can delete at any time.

Once you finish the in-city quests, you are directed to the staging area where you, the supervisor, assign workers to production stations. After you have them all assigned, the resources needed to build the temple start filling up the pallets in front of the canopy-covered work areas. If you did the quests right, you have a couple of extra workers you can assign to actually build the structure.

After that building is completed you are directed to the next area where you do a clean-up of the site and build housing for the workers. You are taught how to repair and use your next piece of equipment. It's in this area where the first of the big graphics issues I had that appeared. The one in the first image above where the workers aren't standing on the ground placing the wooden road. Another one where the workers were in the blocks instead outside the block area hammering them in. There was also the worker in midair on the roof placing slabs of stone!

Right from the beginning in Egypt Frontiers there were numerous little things that also stood out. I found the cursor very annoying being only a small dot instead of a hand or an icon of a hammer or tool similar to what you are working on. A good example would be that hand for collecting resources, or the hammer for breaking of stone. That kind of thing would be easier to line up for the process you are currently doing. 

Don't worry though as I had sent in a bug report about it. I am also disappointed in the structure of the bug report in the game as there was no pop-up screen to add this image to the report. Just a form you fill in and check off what you're including. Once you hit submit though, nothing showed up on what to do to add an image, log, or game save. Just check boxes in the form itself and the dropdown menu for what type of bug it is.

In Egypt Frontiers you will find transition screens with information about Ancient Egypt. I actually found a few of them very insightful as I have read a lot about Ancient Egypt. Also, some of the dialogue screens had hilarious spelling errors, while others were missing a word or two. I dropped in two images where you can see one of each above. 

And with that I shall sign off with the hopes that when Egypt Frontiers releases as a complete game that all those little bothersome bugs will be fixed and smoothed over. The game itself is a lesson about Egypt back at the time of the pyramids. Parts of it felt like one of my regular camping trips, but all the same, the town buildings, the people, those boats! I am amazed. I hope at the end we get the history of the final monument built because my game froze right as I placed the last brick! 

Read More

House Builder 2 - PC Review

House Builder 2 by developer FreeMind S.A. and publisher PlayWay S.A.—PC(Steam) review written by Susan N. with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

---

In January of 2024 FreeMind S.A. and PlayWay S.A. released the first House Builder game onto Steam. It is a building simulation game that had players interested in the trades without the huge cost of entering the profession and the requirement of a lot of permits. The game was successful enough that the developers released House Builder 2 into Early Access. To say that they may have jumped the gun is a massive understatement, much to my disappointment.

Unlike the first game that was well received, House Builder 2 is rather uninspired and downright frustrating at times - usually for incredibly dumb reasons. But before I dive into why I think the game needs a lot more time in the pan and instead it is about as cooked as blue steak, I should qualify some of my personal background that will shed a bit of light on my overall impressions.

Several years ago I was hired on as a helper to a subcontractor. This means that I was always on the job with my boss who taught me about the trade with every job we did. He was the one that worked directly for the company where I was hired by him. Though the company knew about us (the helpers) to their contractors, we were not working for the company. Anyways, the jobs we did were mostly new installations or minor repairs. Many of the jobs we did were storm door installs, shower doors, gazebos, toilets, and sinks. There were a couple of personal jobs we did which involved building a small and simple deck and a gazebo that we should have asked for more money based on all the complications. Thus, my hands on knowledge and understanding of contract work is limited to the above experience. Although, my entire life has been filled with professions that I was interested in like DIY jobs, house flipping, interior design, and architectural design. While I've never built a house from the bottom up, I've always taken an interest in the details about the single largest investment that people make in life.

With that out of the way, let's talk about House Builder 2. 

Gameplay

I suppose the simple place to begin would be the job progression - because there isn't really a story progression. As one might expect, you get hired by a gentleman who lives directly across the street from you and your job is to build a new fence. In the grand scheme of things, this contract is incredibly simple and takes more time to buy the supplies at the local Fixtorama than it is to build the darn thing. Okay. Sure. You're a video game in early access so I'm not expecting a ton of realism regarding the fencing. 

After you complete that job, you are directed to sleep at your home and then to proceed to the next job. Conveniently this second contract is next door to the fence that sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the other houses. Once you arrive there, you are thrust into building a small house. How exactly did we suddenly become an expert on building a house from a fence? I have no idea. We don't even apply for permits or deal with the city planners. Heck, I'd have been fine with a cute notification saying something like "permit acquired for 'x' property". Again, I tossed that part off to being a minor gripe about a simulation builder, but going from a fence to a house was off putting. We could have gone with a fence to a deck to a house addition into a full blown house, but alas that might have been a bit lofty. My bad.

You finally get to spread your wings and head to jobs that are further away. These jobs come to you through your telephone - not a cellphone which was an odd choice in my mind. Amazingly, the game provides you with direction. On the compass, you will see a handy green line leading you to the next contract. For the first few properties, you get this directional indicator but it is short lived. In fact, the longer you play, the less likely you get any direction at all which I'll talk about in more detail in the next section.

With every new job I became more agitated and bored with the state of House Builder 2 because after around five or six contracts you really get the sense of how lifeless the game is. You no longer need to buy supplies at the local Fixtorama because they're all provided which includes the tools needed. The actual house building itself is the easiest gameplay loop in the world. Simply point and click. Don't worry, the game will do the rest with a million staple guns or drills to fasten each piece of drywall. And while the game accounts for some amount of foundation, the real steps to building is a little more logical. You have to build the framework first, and then put the supports in, and finally erect the walls or the gables with a few good people or a crane. Again, while I'm not expecting a hit game, I feel like House Flipper, Powerwash Simulator, and Construction Builder to be much more in depth video games.

 

There is more about the gameplay that bothered me beyond belief. Aside from the absolute lack of plumbing, electrical work, and insulation, you eventually get to a point where you can invest in a new truck or a bigger house. The problem is that there is absolutely no way to buy a new vehicle or fix it up since there is no establishment to do so! And as for a bigger house, well there is only one that you can buy for a whopping $10k (I wish!). The place is beautiful but it's missing a crucial thing - a bed! You know, the thing that skips time to morning so that a job is easier to do? Yeah that. That is missing. What? I'm sorry but I spent my time in game working through the night which is interesting because you - supposedly a good contractor - don't seem to have a light! Who needs safety, am I right? *me flips desk*

Instead of a mechanic that can at least make your crappy truck look like it will survive the first sharp turn it hits, we get a furniture shop. I can't think of something I cared so little about as a person who has several issues of Architectural Digest in my possession. I just.. can't contain my utter lack of interest in an aspect that is completely unneeded in this particular game. This is House Builder not Interior Designer. Those are two separate professions with their own considerations and budgets. Instead of including the furniture shop, could we instead swap in a mechanic that lets us buy a new truck or at least fix up the dead beat junker that we have for the entirety of the game? Sure, we can steal a better looking vehicle but that isn't worth it either. Why? Because if you save the game and quit, the next time you load in, the vehicle has mysteriously vanished, but the supplies that were likely in the back are still at the location. On the ground. And that is assuming the game knew where you were when you logged out. If you spawned back at your first crappy home (not the new one you likely bought either), the game doesn't tell you which property you were working on. You know that handy path that lead you to your destination? Yeah, it never returns after the initial instance... I hope you remembered where you left your original truck and where the job was because otherwise, you're going to have an interesting time. 

Graphics and UI

One could hope that something will make up for the frustrating gameplay, but aside from its simplistic low poly aesthetic, the graphics and UI don't add much to the overall experience. Again, while I wasn't expecting a spectacular game, I also wasn't expecting House Builder 2 to be so lifeless either. 

As mentioned previously, House Builder 2 is a low poly game which is similar not only to its predecessor, but also to other games developed by FreeMind. Though there is a sort of charm that comes with this sort of graphics style, I felt no real draw to the art style after the gameplay dropped me from a proverbial roof. The people and vehicles are procedurally generated and lacked any real life because they followed a regimented path. Asides from some cute voicelines if you hit the people or crashed into another vehicle, they were like robots. 

The islands were needlessly larger than expected. And I hated how little there was to do. In fact, the roads were sometimes steeper than the beat up hunk of crap that you drive could handle. Heck, even the nicer looking cars struggled with certain inclines. Even from the terrain design, the game feels like there was very little thought to any aspect it tried to include.

But a real kicker came from the UI itself. Let's start with the world map. It's useless. Not only does it NOT tell you where your current job is, but it is a static image that you can't rotate or zoom in on. For the first time ever, the rotating compass map in the top corner of the screen was more useful than the overhead map - and I generally find minimaps to be unhelpful. 

You are able to hold up to five separate objects, which includes your tools. As one might expect, you have to have the right tool or the right material for the job you are doing. But considering the game is nothing more than a point and clicker, I'm almost surprised proper tool or material was even a consideration. Heck, the UI doesn't even let you choose the wall color before you start painting. The game has all of that figured out for you. 

Another frustrating part of the UI is grabbing supplies. While it's a simple click and drag to the back of your truck, the orientation and placement is just inconsistent and bad. To boot, there are times where your materials will shift in weird ways because you don't even get to secure them to the vehicle nor because the game has any understanding of proper physics. 

I. Can't. Even. 

Pros and Cons

Sadly the cons will outweigh the pros in House Builder 2. What I can say is that I never fell through the world or managed to get stuck in an area that I couldn't get out of. Aside from that, the game was a nice time waster for a couple of hours but that's all it has to offer right now. 

The cons are much more frequent with weird graphics and/or collision of both the vehicles and the people. Sometimes I'd see four car pile ups and a vehicle magically go flying for no reason at all. I watched as people walked into what were supposed to be solid objects. I gawked at the terrible interpretation of the construction profession and I'm definitely no expert in the field.

The map and the navigation features were non-existent. And after saving and quitting, I found that the game seemed to forget important things like houses that I had already built were still completed but magically had the supplies on the lawn as though it wasn't. Let's not forget the time where the paint seemed to perpetually fall off the wall even though the job was complete. And my favorite failing of the game came from one job where when the structure was complete, the scaffolding vanished, and dropped me on the ground below. No damage taken.

Final Thoughts

House Builder 2 is an uninspired and boring simulation game that pales in comparison to several games within the genre. It is lacking in so many ways that after six hours I'm fairly certain I 'completed' the game, but received no notification indicating such (even after updating where we were supposed to get some kind of achievement). There is little sense in building progression, realism, crucial construction considerations like safety and organization. At one point you can restore an old car or look for random tires and I can only question why those were included in the game. 

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game to anyone at this stage. I think House Builder 2 needs a lot more work before I would even think of suggesting it to anyone.  

Score: 5 out of 10

Read More

Haunted House Renovator: Demo available ahead of Steam Next FEST - PLAY TODAY

2024-06-06 - Image Power is delighted to announce that the Haunted House Renovator demo is now available! Be the first to try it after our successful playtests and add the game to your wishlist. 

Also Available at Steam Next Fest 

Get a sneak peek ahead of the Steam Next Fest happening in June 10-17. This demo gives you an early look at the game’s thrilling blend of home renovation and paranormal activity. Don’t miss your chance to explore and share your experience! 

Experience the Demo and Join the Conversation 

Explore the game’s mechanics, confront various hauntings, and enjoy the detailed, atmospheric graphics and creative decorating options in the Haunted House Renovator demo. Remember to add the game to your Steam wishlist and share your experience by tagging Image Power and Haunted House Renovator on social media! 

Players are also encouraged to join the official Discord server where they can talk with the developers directly. Any feedback is taken very seriously and the game has already gone through many changes since the game’s Kickstarter campaign. 

Changes since the Kickstarter Triumph 

The demo presented at the Steam Next Fest has a lot of extra content and more polish than the Kickstarter preview version showcased in March. New additions include a gremlin intruder, two new rooms to explore, and a fearsome wraith that can possess the player. Aside from that, the tutorial was improved while the game got a lot of quality-of-life improvements, all based on feedback from Kickstarter backers and playtesters. 

Aside from new additions and improvements, the demo went through rigorous bug-fixing, making it more stable than ever before. There may be some lingering bugs still present and optimization isn’t where it needs to be yet but thanks to bug reports submitted by the community, all issues are swiftly taken care of. If a need arises, there may be patches for the demo released during the Steam Next Fest. All to ensure that players have a fun experience trying out the game. 

The Future of Paranormal Renovation 

There’s no official release date yet for the full version of Haunted House Renovator. There is still a lot of work to be done, especially regarding new locations. The full game will feature a campaign, a progression system, a simple pet system (teased but not shown in the demo), and obviously more mysteries and hauntings to solve. Releasing the game in Early Access is a possibility but that decision has not been made yet. 

Right now is a perfect opportunity to experience the thrill of paranormal renovation. There’s a lot to do and experience already, and any suggestions have a real chance of being included in the full game. Don’t miss out on trying the demo of Haunted House Renovator for yourself! 

ABOUT THE GAME 

• In Haunted House Renovator, you take on the role of a paranormal renovator, transforming haunted houses into stunning homes while dealing with ghosts, demons, and other supernatural entities. 
• Key features: 
• A first-person paranormal renovator simulator experience that plunges players into the heart of the supernatural. 
• Atmospheric graphics that set the stage for a truly eerie adventure. 
• Encounters consisting of various hauntings, possessions, and curses players have to combat while navigating through each haunted house. 
• Diverse locations, each presenting its challenges and mysteries. 
• Unbound creativity with decorating, enabling players to transform these haunted houses into inviting homes. 
  

ABOUT IMAGE POWER

The history of Image Power reaches back to 2012 and the establishment of the first concept art and digital painting school in Poland 'Potęga Obrazu'. In 2019, after becoming a public company, Image Power extended the scope of its business to game production and publishing. In April 2021 the Company successfully debuted on the NewConnect market of the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The strategy of the Company assumes working on low-budget productions, including simulators and similar genres, as well as gradually engaging in projects of higher production and marketing scope, including the premium category. Image Power creates games with the use of internal developer teams, as well as external studios. The strategy of the Company is to publish 3-4 titles per year for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox family consoles, and Nintendo Switch.

Article by: Susan N.

Read More

Occupy Mars - PC (Steam) Preview

Occupy Mars: The Game by developer Pyramid Games and publisher PlayWay S.A.—PC preview written by Susan N. with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Introduction

Occupy Mars: The Game is an open world title where the objective is to build a base to endure the harsh environment by using basic survival skills. With a short tutorial, some of the foundational skills needed to survive is explained before entering the deep end of the campaign. After landing on Mars in an escape pod, it's imperative to search ruined bases to salvage items to build a new home for yourself. And as far as you can see, there is no other life on the planet. To sum up the presentation of the game, it has a great foundation to build upon but has some mixed reception.

General Thoughts

My first impression of Occupy Mars is hopeful. On the surface, it looks like the game will be good because the visuals are mostly polished, the gameplay is passable, and the interactions with the environment is decent enough. (Although, there is something to be said for the object hitboxes...) We embark on an exploration journey to salvage broken equipment and bases so that we can live on Mars. This core loop is fine but, as time went on I became frustrated with the game and not because of the core open world survival principles. Simply put, there's just not a lot to the title. 

Now, it's quite clear that Occupy Mars is in Early Access as there are plenty of patches that have been deployed to fix the myriad of bugs that players have encountered. There's also been a bunch of improvements to the overall experience from when it launched into Early Access on May 10th which inspires hope for a successful full release down the road. Additionally, many of the major issues with Occupy Mars seem to have been contained or fixed since launch. Thus, I maintain hope for its continued development.   

Despite the general outlook of the game's future, I am not a fan of the campaign in its current state. Originally my impression was that the campaign was meant to tick off video game checkboxes because the tutorial is paltry at best. After further thought, and a few restarts, the campaign's beginning weirdly works. Instead of dropping you into the fire, the game lets you do rudimentary tasks within an established base. This is important because you don't get that luxury in many games within the survival genre. So, once you get a sense of key elements of gameplay, then you are thrown into the deep end. You will need to start from scratch but with the knowledge of what your home base *could be*. Essentially, the game gives you plenty of opportunities to envision your ultimate home without giving you a laundry list of objectives or awkward building placements that you are forced into using.

Survive

When you scavenge wreckage and explore Mars, you get to handle the survival part of the game. Not only will you have to find and make parts on your own, but you will also have to construct an entire base. This is challenging in itself because you have to research various technologies to build one. You will be confronted with conserving water, electricity generation, and managing hunger while searching for tablets that contain blueprints to progress. 

In the campaign, you will also deal with natural disasters like meteor storms. When these events occur, you will need to repair your base which gives the game an extra layer of difficulty. There's nothing quite like the threat of losing your base because of a random disaster. But these disasters force you to remain awake as time passes by. If that wasn't enough, your health drains as you become increasingly hungry or tired. This concept is not bad as it increases the difficulty of the game. However, forcing us to stand still inside the landing pod (at the beginning) is a complete miss in my opinion. I think the inclusion of disasters is a good one, but not as early as it is. The reason for that is because the player has nothing to do. We can't even speed up time either, which would make this element much more bearable for new players.

Aside from some aspects of base building, the slow time progression, and the challenge of resource conservation, my main issue with Occupy Mars is how little substance there is. On the surface, it looks fleshed out and visually beautiful in places. However, basic functions don't work the same way depending on what items you are using. For example, if you pick up a cable, pressing right click will drop the object. If you are holding a tool, right click will put the object away. It's not a huge issue, however, it can be confusing to know which objects end up in your inventory and which ones fall to the ground.

To elaborate on the game having little substance, when dashing out to a ruined base for parts, there are vast open areas with nothing to see. The video game version of Mars does not appear to have any kind of life forms to break up the monotony of the environment. And while I'm not expecting there to be an oasis or anything, I was expecting some kind of weird creature or at least some bones to add life to the planet. Even adding random broken monuments of past civilizations that doesn't get explained could be added to give some hope for survival. But without having anything exciting beyond the slow story campaign and flat environment, there is little reason to play the campaign mode over the free play one.

Final Thoughts

At this time, Occupy Mars has a decent foundation to build upon, but right now it is a bit thin for what I've seen in Early Access games. As this is a preview of the game, I can only hope that the game developers have plans to expand this title to have a successful full release. As it stands, the price tag is a little steep for what it is. 

So far, Pyramid Games have been patching the game and are continuing to update various aspects of it, which is what we like to see in Early Access. Additionally, there will be another major update that will address a number of issues that base building enthusiasts have commented about, which keeps me hopeful that the game will become an excellent entry in this genre. That's not to say that the game won't be worth the price down the road, but I'd give it a little more time before purchase.  

 

Score: N/A

Article by: Susan N.

Read More

Lust From Beyond - PC Review

Lust From Beyond by developer Movie Games Lunarium and publisher Movie Games S.A., PlayWay S.A.—PC review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Warning: Mature themes ahead

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

---

Lust From Beyond by Movie Games Lunarium is a first person psychological horror thriller that I easily found myself able to immerse into. Not generally my style of adventure, I became interested in the style after seeing Izzy play through the Amnesia series including the most recent Amnesia: Rebirth. So with that, I was off on my own wild adventure of puzzles and mysteries while watching my sanity drop and suffering its consequences.

For those that may not be aware, like I was at first, Lust From Beyond is the latest entry into its series. Only finding out after having started this adventure, I would be interested to know what came before but I don't really think, at least without having gone through them, that they were necessary to enjoy the latest. So taking things from the top, you will be taking the role of Victor who has been tormented by horrible visions and travels to another city in order to meet with a psychiatrist that may be able to help with the things that he’s been seeing. Least does he know that the visions he’s been having would be the least of his problems.

Disclaimer

Now, upfront, this is anything but a family friendly game. Even if one may choose to play through the adventure in a censored mode, it's not going to hide the stronger elements that exist outside the nudity and sexual themes presented therein. On that note, one potential point that I was going to reserve judgement on was how "tasteful" the nudity and the sexual encounters would be presented as they are presented as early as the first chapter. Now there has been a fine line in the presentation of sexual encounters in video games ranging from true “adult” only titles to those of AAA studios adding them in as a reward of sorts for having successfully romanced someone at what can only seem like the end of the world at that point in time.

Falling more into the middle of the two for the most part, while these scenes both exist and require participation on input commands, they play out in tandem with the story and they didn’t feel like they were simply thrown into the mix because they “could” be. Instead, these scenes felt a bit more calculated as they are written in which I appreciated as throwing sex into the mix just to throw sex into the mix can easily ruin the experience being set up especially with one as “bizarre” as this one with characters being able to pass between two realms and see things that would drive even the most sane of people to madness.

This said, Lust From Beyond while working off of the idea of eroticism, is about a lot more than that. Finding himself in the middle of the yearly event, not only will you need to guide Victor through town in order to find his way forward, you’re also going to have to find your way around the insanity of a cult that will easily hunt you down to do more than just kill if they get their hands on you. So not only is this not family friendly, it’s also not for the faint of heart or the weak stomached as there are certain elements that can make you cringe and wonder just what the hell is wrong with these people. Think… Hostel and Hostel II but place Victor in the middle of things and that’s about where things get interesting as there’s only so much a person can take and some of these sights? They’ll drop your sanity hard as some of what you see is more than enough to make someone's stomach turn at the gruesome sights that await you.

So it’s right here that I want to take a moment to both acknowledge and thank the developers for paying attention to their player’s feedback which is why this review is later than it should have been. Having both a health and a sanity meter, once your health drops, the obvious happens and you die. Game Over. Once your sanity drops however, on launch, it would mess with your controls which means forwards would stop being forward and go in another direction. Left and Right would swap. Playing with a controller if you had to press back to move forwards, you couldn’t run and I was quite literally stuck in a chase scene because the controls just wouldn’t let me move past it. Without the ability to load a previous chapter point or manual saves, I had to restart and avoid the sanity drops as best as possible to just HOPEFULLY get through that point.

So it’s on April 1, 2021, this past weekend and not a joke, that the developers pushed out a Lust From Beyond v1.0.1 which fixed this giant issue with sanity and instead had it act more like you would actually expect the loss of sanity to do. You see things that aren’t there, not unlike The Sinking City where even the imaginary monsters can kill you if you think that they are as real as the real ones. Just this small change for us, and most likely enormous change in the back end code for the developers changes what was a potentially flawed good into a good experience.

When you’re not flat out running away from people or monsters trying to kill you though, you’ll either be exploring at a leisurely pace or sneaking around trying to not get caught. The environments are interesting to explore and what I really enjoyed is how much effort went into the ability to manipulate doors especially after reading an article not that long ago on IGN about the woes of developers Putting Doors in Video Games. While exploring through various locations, you’ll be putting your hands on door handles and then either opening them slowly or quickly and then closing them if you choose to. There’s a natural feel to how you handle it so when you’re running away from someone? You’d better be quick to get your hand on the handle and hope that the door isn’t locked so that you can throw it open and keep on running through.

The above is not to say that Lust From Beyond is perfect. For some reason, my main computer couldn’t actually handle it without shutting itself off after a time which was weird as my laptop could carry it through for hours without a hiccup. I'm not sure how wide spread the issue is, but from other posts I know that I am not the only one. Regardless of the platform though, for those using a controller it would have been nice to be able to navigate through everything from the initial load into the game while using it instead of requiring the use of a mouse or keyboard to get past certain screens. Finally, if I did have one thing on my wishlist it would be a chapter select which while the devs say that they can’t promise anything they will look into it.

Summary

Lust From Beyond is definitely not for the faint of heart or for the weak stomached but it is an interesting dive into the realms of the occult and insanity that can appear especially when dealing with the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. Interesting puzzles, crazier environments and even more psychotic cultists and monsters trying to hunt you down, there’s a hell of an adventure to be had if you’ve got the stomach, and the age, for it.

Score: 8 / 10

 

Read More