When I mentioned that I was playing this game, a friend's reaction was "Isn't that that weird game?" As it turns out, that is one accurate way to describe this game. Another way is you DO NOT FUCK AROUND with Lux Pain.

This game was pitched to me as sort of like the Ace Attorney games, but with a bit more of a serious tone and a more up-front supernatural bent. This is accurate, and it is also completely meaningless.

If you decide to play this game, let me give you the one most important piece of advice I can offer right up front – read the instruction manual. You know how most games have a tutorial level where you're walked through the basics of the game? Yeah, Lux Pain has no time for your ignorance of its rules. You WILL read the instructions. You will remember the information. You will then extrapolate tangentially related items from that information.

The game starts you out at an apartment building. The information lady spouts a bunch of babble as though you already know what she's talking about (and of course you do. You read the instruction manual, right? RIGHT?) Then she sends you upstairs to combat two basic shinen, or residual thoughts and emotions infecting an area or person. These things just sort of float around in one place. You erase over them, then press the stylus against them and they become really creepy fragmented thoughts for you to read. (This part? Actually really cool).

And then you leave. And immediately you're confronted with more shinen, but these ones are moving around inside a person. There's no explanation of how to do so, and even reading the manual isn't that great because the "search" function? Functionally useless, for me at least. But before you think about complaining, don't. Lux Pain has no time for your bullshit. Lux Pain expects you to keep up.

A lot of this game seems to be sort of wheel-spinning. There are conversations with a lot of people. There are ongoing feuds between them. There are some really creepy eccentricities. There are some… pretty well-rounded characters actually. And then there are some who seem to be somewhat mentally befuddled. I'm not sure, but I think about 99 percent of the information you get is useless dross. But that little bit of real information, you better commit to memory.

Did I mention that you do not fuck around with Lux Pain? It's true. Actually, you sort of need to be psychic with Lux Pain. There is a type of mental battle you have to do. When you battle the parasite, you have to tap these circles as they turn from blue to white, and if your timing is good, you damage the parasite. (It's in the manual). So the first two fights are like this, but the third… well, it's not. There are still the circles, but they turn white really fast, and they have little glass panes over them, which you can break, but after that, all the tapping in the world does nothing. I try every avenue I can think of to get info on how to fight this fight, eventually turning to the Web for answers.

Turns out, you have to break the glass and then SLASH (not tap) the circles. And this does the damage. I'm not sure if that instruction was given somewhere, but if so, I missed it.

In a lot of ways, that's this game in a nutshell. Interesting ideas, concepts and characters and some genuinely creepy atmospheric bits are strung together with a lack of cohesion and so little intuitiveness that there were times I felt completely lost. It wants to be something like Devil Survivor, or even the old Laura Bow games, where you have a certain amount of time and have to choose what you see, and you get specific bits of the plot based on what you do. And as you can tell, there was some legitimately compelling stuff. I mean, I played the thing all the way through to the end, and I just don't do that if a game bores me.

But I can't recommend it. It's not player friendly. It's not even unfriendly in the "this game is super challenging" way. It's oddly hostile to the idea of playing it, and unless the specific things it does well match up perfectly with how you like to spend your time, it just won't be worth the effort.