As I perused Steam's encyclopedic list of games during the recent Summer Sale, I noticed a few obscure, non-kid-friendly titles pop up in the horror section, one of which caught my eye. Lust for Darkness, with its red-and-black title card and masquerade imagery, invited a click, and revealed a dark, sexually charged descent into Lovecraft-style horror. Boasting a vivid color palette and imagery inspired by H. R. Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski, I decided to reach out to developer Movie Games Lunarium and nab a copy of the game. Overall, Lust for Darkness is a fairly unique adventure game with excellent potential, but the experience is currently too skeletal to warrant a strong recommendation.

The $14.99 Lust for Darkness is primarily a walking simulator, with generic stealth, obnoxious running sections, and a weak story. It's a shame that Lust for Darkness carries those negatives, as it could have been great had the developers focused on the game's strengths: atmosphere, exploration, and puzzle-solving gameplay.

Lust for Darkness follows Jonathan, an architect in a nondescript Pennsylvania town. Jonathan's wife, Amanda, disappeared a year ago, so he becomes hopeful when he receives a letter in the dead of night from her, inviting him to Yelverton Mansion. Seeking answers, Jonathan looks up the address and drives off to find her.

While the introduction sounds a bit like the start of Resident Evil 7, Lust for Darkness doesn't waste any time establishing the mansion's horrors. An eccentric cult uses Yelverton Mansion as a base for its orgy-fueled summoning rituals, blurring the line between our realm and a monstrous, sexually charged dimension called Lusst'ghaa. Sure, the name is a little on the nose, but Lust for Darkness doesn't much care for subtlety; you're sneaking around a sex-cult's base of operations in search of your wife, so nudity and sex abound.

Lust for Darkness blends stealth, puzzle solving, and survival in a way that resembles titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma. You spend most of your time investigating areas, searching for keys and puzzle parts, and occasionally evading cultists and demons as you look for your wife. Lust focuses heavily on sexuality and the occult, rather than building a looming sense of dread as Amnesia or Soma do.

Lust also lacks a strong overarching narrative. Once the game establishes your goal, rescuing Amanda, there is no real development for Jonathan, Amanda, or the antagonist, Willard, which make the plot twists and revelations fall flat. It's difficult to feel pity, shock, or horror towards people with whom you don't empathize. Likewise, the horror the cult unleashes upon itself does not resonate, and feels more comical than terrifying, since the player doesn't get to know the cultists aside from their deranged obsession with the demonic dimension.

Lust's gameplay is oddly uneven at times, pushing stealth sections on you only to quickly drop the pretense and switch to exploration. Then, the game moves to evasion sections, which require you to outrun a monster or boss, before transitioning back to exploration again. Lust doesn't do anything interesting or impressive with any of its gameplay portions, either, which makes the game feel slapdash and oddly paced. During stealth sections, for example, you simply avoid enemies' direct line of sight. The solutions are almost painfully obvious. Once you complete these stealth sections, you find a mask or outfit that lets you blend in with cultists, removing any tension for the next few sections of the game.

Compared with a dedicated stealth game like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain—which gives you the ability to create distractions or blend in with scenery—Lust for Darkness is absolutely bare bones. Even games with mediocre stealth sections, like Mafia III, feel more interesting and thoughtful, as they give you a few tools to use to your advantage during stealth gameplay. Lust for Darkness would be better off dropping the stealth aspects entirely and focusing on puzzle solving. This gameplay shift would allow for deeper access to the mansion, rather than forcing players to waste a few minutes skulking around in areas that they never get to revisit.

The running portions are similarly flawed, though they are more thrilling than the stealth sections. However, running segments can feel particularly cheap, since they crop up unexpectedly and almost always result in an immediate death. In the first of such sections, a demon you haven't previously encountered runs in and murders you. The only way to avoid the demon is to know that it's coming, which makes the experience more annoying than exciting. Subsequent encounters with these demons aren't much better. Worse still, you can't take your time and enjoy the grotesque imagery in these areas when you're running around like a headless chicken evading some lanky demon with goofy blade arms.

Lust for Darkness is at its best when it functions as a simple walking simulator with puzzles thrown into the mix. The game's strongest aspect by far is its beautiful and eerie art direction, particularly in the demonic dimension that you visit throughout the game.

The monstrous realm of Lusst'ghaa is very dark, yet powerfully colored, with shades of blue, red, and violet vividly enlivening every room. This realm is twisted with fleshlike structures strongly inspirated by H. R. Giger and Beksinski's artwork. This world also has a curious tree aesthetic that unifies the many rooms and halls you explore. Black, twisting roots and brambles coil around the ribs, flesh, and phallic structures throughout the environment.

The game features some genuinely disturbing areas, with particularly unnerving visuals. For example, one room featured a wall of massive, vaguely human faces with blank, black eyes, which seem to follow you around despite not actually moving. And while there is nothing dangerous in said room, save for a very clever jump scare, I felt a genuine sense of dread just from being there. I would have loved to spend more time in these areas, but the developers drop the ball by not building any interesting gameplay aspects into these rooms. Worse still, ill-timed demon encounters in others force you to run for your life and prevent you from appreciating the details.

The mansion is also rich with personality. You can poke around in drawers and cabinets for the occasional bit of lore text, or an absurd assortment of grotesque, phallic idols and toys hidden within the coffers. You occasionally catch dialogue from the resident cultists, who express their paranoia at the demonic happenings, or their obsessive commitment to their supernatural cause. The mansion also houses a few hidden artifacts, which unlock three side stories explaining the origins of the villain and cult. However, these stories are only accessible in the main menu, and only if you have found all the corresponding artifacts. That's highly unfortunate, because these companion pieces flesh out the story much more than the in-game narrative. Aside from the occasional artifact or lore dump, you don't spend nearly as much time in the environments as I would have liked. More puzzles, key hunts, lore texts, and cultists to eavesdrop on would make exploration much more rewarding.

Storytelling is Lust for Darkness' greatest weakness. The sexual element is interesting, and I appreciate that Movie Games Lunarium took the angle that it did. The art direction is excellent, and while the nudity is pretty blatant, it doesn't feel inappropriate considering the game's tone. Likewise, the perverse sculptures and architecture felt natural when taking into account the cult's eccentric, wealthy followers and leader. But the atmosphere alone isn't enough to carry the game, since unfortunately, none of the characters are compelling.

I could initially sympathize with Jonathan's plight; he's a man seeking answers. But once he gets to Yelverton Mansion, he doesn't react very much to his surroundings, save for some nervous thoughts or statements. Jonathan experiences some genuinely shocking revelations about his wife, their marriage, and the cult he attempts to free her from, yet all of this is presented matter-of-factly, which takes away their impact. One would think, if your wife spent a year within a crazy sex cult, that you would have a few pointed questions. Jonathan, however, never seems upset at what happened to her. Exploring the fleshy, organic halls of a demonic realm might elicit a greater response from most—beyond the few throwaway lines Jonathan delivers. A half-baked story, coupled with weak character development, ruins any suspension of disbelief, which is highly disappointing considering the game's Lovecraft inspiration.

This narrative weakness is all the more apparent when you unlock the three side stories, which elaborate on Willard and his origins, the birth of the cult, and on Lusst'ghaa. These stories are short, narrated, comic book-style scenes that greatly expound upon elements within the main game. The campaign hints at some of these aspects, all of which would have built a more satisfying experience if integrated better into the campaign, rather than hidden away as some unlockable secret.

Bloodborne, for example, does a fine job of depicting its supernatural elder gods and their bizarre desire for surrogate wombs and fetal sacrifice, largely through lore text found in-game. While its unfair to expect so much from a tiny developer, I think the game's story could have been much more impactful if the many plot points and backstory were uncovered purely through exploration at the player's leisure and revealed piecemeal, rather than the game's bland, voice-acted melodrama. Finding journal entries, newspaper clippings, medical documents, and other such items with information and lore could have better fleshed out the events within the mansion and the cult's obsession with Lusst'ghaa, while also rewarding the players who explore every nook and cranny of the debased abode. This approach could have also aped some great epistolary gothic novels, such as Dracula and Frankenstein, which fit right in with the developer's vision of adult horror.

Lust for Darkness doesn't require high-end PC components to run well. At the minimum, your gaming PC needs a 3.2GHz AMD Phenom II X4 955-4 Core or a 3.2GHz Intel Core i3 CPU, an AMD Radeon R9 280 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 GPU, 8GB RAM, and the Windows 7 operating system.

My gaming PC packs an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 GPU and a 3.5GHz Intel i5-4690 CPU; a smidge below the recommended game specs. Still, I had no trouble running the game at high settings during testing; Lust for Darkness relies more on its art direction to carry the game, rather than any resource-intensive graphics. Lust for Darkness hovered at the 60 frames-per-second mark during most of my play time.

Lust for Darkness's sexual angle is genuinely refreshing. I appreciate that, while explicit, it doesn't aim to be crude or immature, as I feared it might at first glance. I enjoyed the idea of a protagonist looking for someone within a mansion, surrounded by obsessive, nymphomaniac cultists, with a darker presence pulling the strings. Had Lust for Darkness simply allowed me to piece together the story by snooping around the mansion while collecting bits of lore and solving puzzles along the way, I would have had a better time. In its current form, Lust for Darkness is a decent but flawed experience, given its sidelined lore and annoying running and evasion segments. Still, I would love to see Movie Games Lunarium tackle a similar game, albeit with a more focused plot or more cryptic puzzle-solving.

Bottom Line: Lust for Darkness is a decent horror-adventure game with strong visuals and satisfying mature themes, but the weak story and annoying gameplay quirks weaken the experience.