EDIT – I goofed and thought I saw the phrase “Bury your seed in me” said during the game, but the actual sentence was a few I mixed together: “Bury me in your berries.” and “Be my bad seed.” My points about the game still stand, but that particular phrase is not in the game.
How much time did you spend playing games this week? Of that time, how much of it was spent killing things? Short of dialogue in cutscenes and loading screens, I’d guess the amount is somewhere in the vicinity of %100. Mine typically is, except for a few odd game experiences here and there. Luxuria Superbia tries to take things in a different direction, asking that the player play nice with a game. It’s a concept that took me by surprise, forcing me to calm down from my usually overly-aggressive gaming self and take things slow. It’s a different kind of experience, but then again, this is Tale of Tales we’re talking about. If you didn’t come here to try out something new and unique, you may be in the wrong place.
Your job in the game is to move down a series of tunnels and fill them with color. For Tale of Tales, this is probably the most straightforward and video game-like they’ve ever gotten, as their games often explore complex thoughts and plots through unorthodox gameplay styles. Try out The Path or anything else from their library to see what I mean. So, having to move down a tunnel using both control sticks (I played the PC version with a controller) felt far more like a regular game than I expected from them. I thought I knew the score as soon as I saw how to play, brushing off their instructions and going to town on the walls. I touched every flower bud that came my way as I moved down the tunnel, filling the corridors with color in seconds. I was rocking the game’s face off! But then, the screen filled with white before I’d even come close to the first marker, kicking me out to the level select screen. What had I done? Wasn’t I winning?
“It’s ok. These things happen.” the game said, and that’s when I started to get a hint on what was really happening.
Luxuria Superbia is a game about being subtle; about being gentle. Your job isn’t conquering some barrage of enemies or completing a level in record time. It’s not a race, and it’s not even really a competition. There are points for going the distance, but really, it’s not exactly hard to keep the game from ending unless you choose to finish a level. Your job, more than anything, is to just enjoy the journey as you’d like to take it and then walk away when you feel satisfied with what you’ve done. It’s a strange way to set up a video game, but this is a company that is more interested in crafting new interactive experiences than in challenging the player’s reflexes or patience. It’s something that I had a lot of fun when I got myself into the right mindset and started to relax with it a bit.
Getting back to the in-game text I previously mentioned, the game is about sex, but not in the typical way games or most media communicate it. Sex in Luxuria Superbia isn’t some sort of reward you get for saying all the right things and taking the right actions over the course of a game. It’s not something that’s given to the hero as a reward for saving the heroine enough times. In this game, you are already in the middle of things, and you’re tasked with making sure that both you and your digital partner have a good time. Luxuria Superbia likes a slow build, asking you to color its corridors slowly and evenly, never rushing to complete any one area but making sure everything gets an even amount of attention. After that point, it wants you to maintain until you’re both ready to finish (the level) at the same time, and then it explodes in a spectacular kaleidoscope of color and light.
“Yes.” the game says. “That was wonderful.” Well, now we’re talking!
We’re pretty far into abstract territory, aren’t we? Even so, the game’s tunnels are a little organic-looking, especially the “flowers” that you select to go into each stage. I…uh…well, they don’t look like any flowers I know, but maybe I’m just communicating something about myself via a Rorschach test I wasn’t aware I was taking. At any rate, they look pretty organic to me, especially when you start moving down the tunnels, and especially when they’re colored in pink or red.
They become less obvious over time, going to downright strange places, such as turning the tunnel into a blue sky filled with clouds and birds, or an ocean teeming with sea life. The symbolism seems far less overt in these areas, but it’s hard to deny how striking they are. By the time you get to the third section of each of these tunnels, they’re filled with various objects and shapes that come shooting out as you touch the flower buds along the way. If you overstimulate the tunnel and make it speed up, you can make more objects come flying out by touching a small amount of the flowers during this stage, carefully watching to make sure you don’t finish the stage too early. Doing this will reward you with more objects appearing and the coloration of the tunnel may change even further, but your point meter stops rising when you do this so it’s purely for your own enjoyment at this point.
The points do allow you to add more color to the hub world you choose your levels from, so you will want to get high scores in the stages as you play them. You’ll want to go the distance most of the time, but to be honest, I found it was far more exciting to push closer and closer to ending the levels prematurely during the third stage by over-touching areas. The rush of flying down those tunnels and collecting enough flowers to nearly finish was more fun than building up some stupid score, especially because of the speed and the powerful visuals that appear. It feels good to keep Luxuria Superbia quivering on the edge, hovering there as long as possible before finally pushing it over and into an explosive show of light and color. Besides, coloring the hub world doesn’t really seem to do anything besides make the hub world more brightly colored. Screw scores.
One complaint I do have is that at some times, your progress meter moves from the top left corner of the screen down to the middle of the screen. It does this periodically when you pass into the different areas of the tunnels, but sometimes it stays right in the middle of the screen and gets in the way of the visuals. It’s transparent so you can still see through it just fine, but it does clutter up my enjoyment of the game’s visuals when it’s there. It only seemed to appear there some times and I couldn’t figure out why it stayed or left, so it may be a glitch in the game. No matter what it is, I’d be happy to see it get patched out of my way and back into it’s corner so I could continue enjoying the visuals.
That being said, there does feel like there’s something missing when this game is played on PC. The game uses a twin stick control scheme, one that makes it so your reticules only appear when you’re moving or holding the sticks in a direction. This makes the game relatively simple once you figure it out as you can just leave the walls alone by letting the sticks return to the default position, meaning you’ll never really over-color the walls by accident, but using the sticks feels wrong, somehow. The game was built with touch in mind, being a symbolic game about sex and eroticism, so not making some kind of contact with it makes it feel like an important aspect is missing. This game is better played using a tablet (and is cheaper to get for tablets anyway), as the design and theme just begs for physical contact. The visual designs of the tunnels seem much better suited for the PC where the screen space is much bigger, but this game was designed with touch in mind. If you’re interested so far, you should definitely try for a touch screen version over the PC.
You might want to be careful who you’re playing the game around, as it’s not especially shy or symbolic ahttp://mashthosebuttons.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=42594&action=editbout some of its dialogue. It’s a fair amount better than the cheap porn that you clear from your bookmarks on a daily basis, but the game is still going to say things like “Yes, right there!”, “Me on top of you.”, and “Take me, I’m yours.” These words will appear right in the middle of the screen, pale enough not to interfere with gameplay but visible enough that someone nearby might wonder what you’re playing. The phrases aren’t all like that, as the game plays around with sentences that seem more geared around moving through stages of intimacy in a relationship, but it’ll still say some downright dirty things at time. Then again, in a game that’s technically about touching flowers, maybe I’m the one who’s reading too much into the phrase “Yes, right there!”
The surreal experience is tied together with its relaxing, space-like soundtrack. There’s something about the game’s soundtrack that just makes it all feel like I’m floating on some slow-paced mental journey. It unwound me and mentally prepared me for the slow, more intimate pace the game expected me to play at, and made rushing through the game feel like a stupid idea (except at the end of each stage). A lot of it is quite beautiful and strange in places, and it just feels like an excellent fit for such an odd game.
The game comes together in such a strange but apt simulation of adult eroticism, something I felt was going to be impossible from looking at it in a few screenshots. I thought it was going to be some pretentious artistic crap devoid of any actual discourse on the subject and just relying on hokey symbolism, but it’s the gameplay that really made the ideas click. Yes, it talks a little dirty and the tunnels all look a little too much like female genitalia in some senses, but it’s in the fact that you’re not trying to win in these tunnels that the game succeeds in its message. Your job isn’t to rush down them, nor is it to set a high score or see if you can go the longest. You are pretty much just allowed to go at whatever pace you like, trying to reach a point where you’ve satisfied that level by working with what it needs. You go gently, collecting flowers slowly and then quickly depending on what you both you and the game want. Like in a real intimate relationship, you work together, and there is no set goal or perfect method to complete things. You just feel things out and then finish together when you feel that you’re both ready.
Luxuria Superbia does a great job exploring a complex subject using gameplay and visuals, and happened to make a game that was fun and relaxing to play at the same time. If you’re in need of high-energy action you may want to keep on walking, but if you’re willing to slow things down and relax, it’s a good time. The fact that it’s the most tasteful, mature depiction of sex and eroticism in this medium doesn’t hurt it as well. Sure beats watching two plastic people with dead eyes mashing their bodies together like a couple of pistons in a mechanism.
Luxuria Superbia is available to buy from the developer’s site.
