One of those epochal clashes between dirty, abrasive, endearing eco-romance and cute, sinister Y2K-era techno-optimism turned satire of imperialism. These angles lock arms in a subtle but ever-looming creation story of what video games, as puzzle boxes and a storytelling medium, could become in the new millennium. Love-de-Lic finally mastered this kind of anti-RPG disguising a clever adventure, and L.O.L's occasional flaws rarely distract from the majesty and sheer emotional gamut this offers. Here's a Gaia of broken promises, uprooted existence, twisted social covenants, and how to survive and adapt in a harsh universe where we're the only love we give.
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023
If Moon RPG was a thesis polemic and UFO a dissertation, then Lack of Love was Kenichi Nishii & co.'s post-doctorate trial by fire. The era of overly experimental, often commercially unviable projects like this on PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and now Dreamcast was slowly in decline. Almost all the post-bubble era investment capital needed to support teams like them would filter increasingly into stable, more conservative groups and companies working on console games. In a sense, they saw themselves as a dying breed, the kind that gets stomped all over in this year-2000 cautionary tale. I'm just glad Ryuichi Sakamoto helped produce this and get it to market, especially given the system's poor performance in Japan. His music and environmentalist/anti-capitalist stance stick out at times throughout the story, but he's mainly taking a backseat and giving Love-de-Lic their last chance to create something this ambitious together. In all the years since, the studio's staff diaspora has led to countless other notable works, and parts of L.O.L. both hint at those while revealing what was lost.
We're far from Chibi-Robo or the Tingle spinoffs here, after all. Lack of Love shows unwavering confidence in the player's ability to roleplay as this evolving, invisibly sentient creature who experiences many worlds on one planet, both native and invasive. Every real or fake ecosystem we travel to, whether by accident or in search of respite, offers enough challenge, task variation, and indulgent audiovisuals to keep one going. I wish I could say that for more players, though. It might not reach the difficulty and obtuseness of much older graphic adventures from the Sierra and Infocom glory years, but I've seen enough people who like classic games bounce off this one to know it's a hard ask. You have no choice but to poke, prod, and solve each environment with verbs you'd normally never consider, such as simply sleeping in a spot for longer than feels comfortable or, well, interesting. It's more than beatable, but I won't begrudge anyone for watching this or relying on a walkthrough. LDL designed L.O.L to be dissected, not gulped down. Tellingly, though, the game starts and ends with a titanic beast possibly devouring you unless you act quickly, instinctively perhaps.
One moment that frustrated me, but also revealed the genius behind it all, was trying to race the bioluminescent flyers on level 5. By this point I've transformed a few times, having become a frilly flightless fellow with plenty of brawn and speed. Darting across this mixture of bizarre swamp, desert, and grassland terrain has led to what feels like a softlock, a set of plant walls I can only squeeze by if I use the right tool. Lack of Love succeeds in telegraphing points of interest for most puzzles, be it the obvious dirt starting line for the night races in this grove, or the cold and minimalistic off-world objects and structures seen later. What's never as obvious is how exactly to interact with other creatures for more complex tasks. Helping out by killing a larger bully or retrieving a parent's lost child is straightforward, but something as simple as just entering the race used a good hour of my time here. Oh sure, I could win the race all right…but it took way too long for the game to recognize and reward me, forcing another long wait from night to day and back again since there's only one lap a cycle.
I recognize that my impatience got in the way of just accepting this, one of life's many setbacks. So I simply waited all day and half a night to repeat the ritual until I got it right. A majority of L.O.L's dialogue with players and critics comes down to how it considers rituals, those habits justified & unjustified which define our daily lives. If anything, the interrogation of normalized behaviors, and the true intentions or lack of them hiding behind, define the studio's short career. As I gorged on helmet-headed stilt walkers and headbutted tree-nuts to slurp up their fruit, it dawned on me how well this game handles repetition. Many times did I get entranced into calling, roaring, and pissing all over each map to see if some cool event or interaction could happen where it'd make sense. Most of these levels are well-built for quickly crossing from one relevant hotspot to another. That desire to see it all through, no matter when I got humiliated or had to slog past something I'd solved but failed to do just right at just the right moment…it makes all of this worthwhile.
Progression throughout Lack of Love isn't usually this janky or unintuitive though. The game's main advancement system, the psychoballs you collect to activate evolution crystals, accounts for skipping the befriending process with some of your neighbors. It makes this a bit more replayable than usual for the genre, as you can leave solving the tougher riddles to a repeat run while continuing onward. I wish there wasn't anything as poorly built as this firefly race, or the somewhat tedious endgame marathon where your latest form can't run. But while that impedes the game's ambitions somewhat, it usually isn't a dealbreaker. LDL's crafted an impressive journey out of life's simplest moments, pleasures, and triumphs over adversity, from your humble start inside a hollow tree to the wastes of what the eponymous human resettling project has wrought. There's only a few "special" moves you can learn, from dashing to
In short, L.O.L. is a study of contrasts: the precious, vivacious yet forever dangerous wilds of this planet vs. the simpler, stable yet controlling allure of organized systems and societies. Nothing ever really works out in nature, not even for the apex predators like me. Yet everything has to work according to some plan or praxis in any form of civilization, something made possible through explicit communication. Love de Lic's challenge was to treat players with as much respect for their intelligence as possible before giving them something inscrutable—no straight line to triumph. This game had to feel alien, but still somehow understandable for its themes and messages to resonate. It's an unenviable goal for most developers. Just ask former LDL creators who have moved on to more manageable prospects. Obscurantism is a mixed blessing all throughout the experience, and I can't imagine this game any other way.
The opening level at least prepares you for the long, unwieldy pilgrimage to enlightenment through a few key ways. Popping out of the egg, swimming to shore, and the camera panning over a creature evolving via silver crystals gives a starting push. Then there's the initial "call for help", a newborn creature struggling to get up. Getting your first psychoball requires not aggression, but compassion for other ingenues like you. On the flipside, you end up having to kill a predator much larger and stronger than yourself, just to save harmless foragers. I definitely wish the game did a better job of avoiding this Manichean binary for more of the psychoball challenges, but it works well this early on. Maybe the initially weird, highly structured raise-the-mush-roof puzzle west of start was a hint of more involved sequences either planned or cut down a bit
Crucially, the following several stages demonstrate how Lack of Love's alien earth is far from some arcadian paradise. The game simply does not judge you for turning traitor and consuming the same species you just helped out; regaining their trust is usually just as easy. One look at the sun-cracked, footstep-ravaged wasteland outside your cradle portends further ordeals. LDL still wants you to succeed, however. The start menu offers not only maps + your current location for most levels, but a controls how-to and, most importantly, a bestiary screen. It's here where each character's name offers some hint, small or strong, pointing you towards the right mindset for solving their puzzle. Matching these key names with key locations works out immediately, as I figured out with the "shy-shore peeper" swimming around the level perimeter. Likewise, the next stage brought me to a labyrinth of fungi, spider mites, and two confused gnome-y guys who I could choose to reunite. Taking the world in at your own pace, then proceeding through an emotional understanding each environment—it's like learning how to breathe again.
L.O.L finds a sustainable cadence of shorter intro levels, quick interludes, and larger, multi-part affairs, often split up further by your evolution path. Giving three or five psychoballs to the crystal altars sends you on a path of no return, growing larger or more powerful and sometimes losing access to creatures you may or may not have aided. The music-box pupating and subsequent analog spinning to exit your shell always pits a grin on my face. Rather than just being punctuation for a numbers game (ex. Chao raising in Sonic Adventure, much as I love it), every evolution marks a new chapter in the game's broader story, where what you gain or lose with any form mirrors the existential and environmental challenges you've faced. As we transition from the insect world to small mammals and beyond, the heal-or-kill extremes ramp up, as do the level designs. I wouldn't call Love-de-Lic's game particularly mazy or intricate to navigate, but I learned to consult the map for puzzles or sleeping to activate the minimap radar so I could find prey. It'd be easy for this evolve-and-solve formula to get stale or ironically artificial, yet LDL avoids this for nearly the whole runtime!
Early hours of traipsing around a violent but truly honest little universe give way to a mysterious mid-game in which L.O.L. project puppet Halumi intervenes in the great chain of being. An impossibly clean, retro-futurist doll of a destroyer plops down TVs in two levels, each showing a countdown to…something big. Nothing good, that's for sure, and especially not for the unsuspecting locals you've been trying to live with. So far it's mostly just been a couple short tunes and Hirofumi Taniguchi's predictably fascinating sound design for a soundscape, but now the iconic tune "Artificial Paradise" starts droning in the background. Musical ambiance turns to music as a suite, a choreographed piece overriding the vocals and cries you know best. Then the terraformer bots come, and the game introduces another stylistic dalliance: the disaster movie removed from civilization. We've gone from colorful, inviting, mutualistic landscapes to invaded craggy rocksides, a very survival horror-ish insect hive where you play Amida with worker bugs, and a suspiciously utopian "final home" for our alien cat and others just like us.
The final levels satisfyingly wrap all these loose threads into a narrative on the ease with which precarious lives and ecology fall prey to not just the horrors of colonization, but the loss of that mystery needed to keep life worth living. Neither you nor the last creatures you help or save have time or dignity left as the L.O.L. project faces its own consequences, radiating across the world in turn. But I'm familiar with that shared dread and understanding of what it's all coming to, as someone living through destructive climate change my whole lifetime. How does one carry on in a land you remember functioning before it was poisoned? What can family, friends, mutual interests, etc. do against the tide of sheer, uncaring war or collapse?
There's a definite rage hiding behind Love-de-Lic's minimalist approach, only rising to the surface at the game's climax. You can taste the proverbial cookie baked with arsenic, a barbed attitude towards living through these times after growing up hoping and expecting a bright tomorrow. To make it out of this world alive takes a lot of seriousness, but also heart and a sense of humor, which Lack of Love never lets you forget. The ending sequence had me beyond relieved, overjoyed yet mournful about how no environmentalist hero's journey of this sort seems to work beyond the plane of fiction. Is it a lack of love consuming us, or the forced dispersion of it? L.O.L. justifiably refuses to give a clear answer, something even its developers are searching for. It's not the most sophisticated kind of optimistic nihilism anyone's imbued in a work, but a very fitting choice for this adventure.
Plot and thematic spoilers ahead
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Friendship, whether convenient or desirable on its own, becomes even more important during the second robot attack you suffer through. A mutual species has been living with your newfound family, and one of these more plant-/shroom-shaped fellows is still mourning their dead feline pal near the bottom of the map. Yet again, though, rituals and routines like the egg worship above supplant the ignored pain and due diligence owed in this community. Shoving the guy away from an incoming bulldozer, only to get squashed yourself, is the most you end up doing in this apocalypse. It only gets worse after awakening not in the natural world, but an eerie facsimile of it, built aboard the L.O.L. spaceship that we saw dive into the planet with a virus' silhouette. Even highly-evolved lifeforms, now able to talk in bursts and build a structured society, lose sight and make mistakes. But only humanity can play God for these fauna and flora, such that you're imprisoned in a hell superficially resembling home.
Gone are the toils of comprehending other species, or stumbling haphazardly through situations that should have killed you long ago. All that Halumi and the humans want from you, their obscure object of desire, is to pass basic push-and-pull block mazes. Imagine sitting down for your high school exams, having studied the world and its intricacies for so long, only for them to hand you an arcane IQ test. There's no assumption of ecological intelligence in the robot's data banks or AI model, just a delight in watching you wriggle through Backrooms Sokoban. Halumi merely chuckles as you clear each room, then lures you into an abstract abyss of phosphenes just to play tag. We then watch the banal. comically on-the-nose mission video recounting humanity's failure to manage their own planet and ecosystem, meaning they must export their hopes, dreams, waste, and destruction to another. Some reward for getting this far in a contrived, worthless series of "tests" they're apparently obligated to perform.
And you'll quickly notice your suffering isn't that unique, either. The quote-unquote habitat caging you is policed by Halumi's robots and, more bizarrely, flying baby androids dispensing this game's send-up of pet food. It's clearly nothing too healthy or appropriate for the menagerie of organic inhabitants imprisoned on this ark. They're literally shitting themselves everywhere they go after eating! And those who fail the tests get treated as literal waste, too. Falling into the scrap closet, with its once-pristine walls peeling and the remaining animals suffering without dignity, shows the depths that this whole "sustainable" planetary resettlement program has sunk to. Some might say the game gets much too unsubtle at this point, which I can agree with. But given the current state of poaching, zoos-as-businesses, habitat displacement, industrial ranching, and careless pet adoption in our own world, maybe these messages work best when they're blunt. Halumi forcing his units to not kill, study, and presumably burn you up after just for failing a test is perhaps the only sign of remorse this antiseptic dungeon offers.
Impressing Halumi with each test comes to a head when we're given a Hobson's choice: the hilariously, insultingly ugly baby-bot or the friend we had sacrificed our safety for back in the pridelands. Predictably, you get thrown in the trash again for making the better choice. Choosing the infant, and all that humanity represents through Halumi and their army, merely makes you a glorified pet for the robot, stuck in the same fancy hotel room as two other dubiously lucky critters (plus Dave Bowman on the bed, out of camera—IDK, this feels like a 2001 reference just as much as the game's intro). Did I mention we haven't evolved for quite a while now? Guess what you become next: an awkward, baleful mirror of the baby from earlier, unable to run and too oversized for these new comforts purportedly made with kids in mind.
No one's at home here, not even the robots if that's even a concept they're built to comprehend (which I doubt). We may be out of hell, but this purgatory isn't much better. After helping the alligator with the shower and the flowery bloke with table manners, the soft but melancholy downtempo lounge of Sakamoto's "Dream" rings out from the hi-fi stereo. Beyond being one of my new favorite melodic ambient songs in any soundtrack, it perfectly conveys how much these "successful" test animals have lost, something we're used to even as we resist the circumstances. It's their last respite, just as playing this game might, for some, be an escape from our own degrading world in which we're seemingly powerless to stop the bleeding.
To the master robot's credit, they aren't too keen on keeping us here at all costs. Halumi's got big plans to fulfill, as they're quick to shoo us off from the ship's bridge. A quick peek outside the rocket shows the beginnings of an American-style highway going nowhere good, and an abnormal dust storm blowing every which way. I tried looking at my map here and found, to both horror and amusement, that there is no map at this point in Lack of Love. The protagonist's been disconnected from the outside world for so long, and exposed to the hubris and demystification of these captors, that only what intuition's left can lead the way out of here. L.O.L gives you compelling, frustrating predicament: stay in the Artificial Paradise—the map of the realm consuming the realm itself, Borges' fabled copy corrupting and then replacing the original—or finish your pilgrimage, an impossible trek through a ruined, desiccated, hopeless bastardization of home?
LDL already knows I'm going to press onward. That’s what they taught me, this new citizen of the earth, right from the start! And of course it's painful, having nothing to feed on as I crawl desperately towards a far-off exit, saving a primate friend in the process. But hope re-emerges when reuniting with that friend from the village, waiting so long to see if we're okay. The story's optimistic views on mutualism within anarchy finally collide with all the forced order and folly of its antagonists. Few moments in video games feel as biting and final as this last set-piece, a forced run away from falling tectonic plates as the L.O.L project finally collapses under the weight of all its systemic damage to the planet. We also have one last metamorphosis, saving you from death by hunger and replacing the corrupted infant form with one resembling an early human, alternating between running on twos and fours. All the player's achievements, elation, and suffering have built up to this, whether there's survival or mere death waiting at the end.
In the end, L.O.L. opts for a happy ending it's done everything to suggest can't happen. The planet rejects the virus, despite having deteriorated so much it loses its magnetic field. All of Halumi and the robots' systems suffer systemic collapse, preventing much more fatal consequences had they continued sapping the global lifeforce. Most importantly, our "hero" and boon companion crest the mountain in time to witness god rays breaking through the storm that had slowed us and threatened doom. I put hero in quotes because, just as with Moon RPG a few years prior, Nishii can't let us leave this fantasy as models to be revered, icons of victory beyond reproach. Even our protagonist had to invade, predate, and take from others their tokens of trust and acceptance, all to reach this point. But in an imperfect reality, this hardly makes us the villain either. This remarkably smart, courageous, and wise duo prevailed against odds not to prove something or selfishly leave this world behind, but to support each other during an eschatological nightmare. Just as that lack of love nearly ruined this world, the overwhelming abundance of it is finally enough to get you and someone else through the end times. Even if it didn't work, would it not have been worth it?
Our story passes on into collective memory, but Halumi's is just beginning. They're an embarrassment to their creators' hopes and whims, the once innocuous but now disgraced mascot of colonialism. Moreover, bots like Halumi and the minions are simply expendable metal to forge anew. L.O.L. ain't gonna stop at just one failure on a single planet, not with humanity's future at stake. So they'll try their luck elsewhere, and probably destroy that wandering rock in the name of civilization. But not this world. This once dominant predator from the heavens is just another vulnerable denizen now, and that's what frees them. The giant who once wielded an army and crushed all biomes to bits now gingerly steers clear of the smallest critter it meets. Halumi's learned to love the world as it is, not from orders on high or as a sandbox to redevelop. And so the circle of life incorporates one more host, a guilty conscience on the way to carving a new, more empathetic destiny from what's left.
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End of spoilers
One has to wonder how delicately and effortlessly this game touches on something as complicated as anarchy vs. hierarchy. Both protagonist and antagonist ultimately seek a place in their world: a mercurial, fluid entity among the bio-sprawl, or a cybernetic King Canute damming the primordial ocean of life and commanding its tides. There's a clear throughline from Moon RPG's evil-hero-good-interloper dynamic to the equivalent in this game, but L.O.L. sees room for redemption. It avoids the easy pessimism this premise could thrive upon, albeit not by asserting humanity's exceptionalism in the face of catastrophe. Halumi's just one more anthropomorphic tool exploited by the powers that be to accomplish their foolhardy wars on worlds they think are beneath them. This weaponized cuteness only works until the illusion of respectability or shared gain has evaporated; now they're just a tin can ready to rust away on an abandoned Eden. It's time to stop fighting. It's time to survive.
Lack of Love leaves me wanting despite all that it's evoked from me. Another late-game stage expanding on the prairie village's growing pains, and the tensions between tribe mentality and complex new hierarchies, would have made me rate this even higher. The best bits sometimes get drowned over tetchy player controls, or poorly telegraphed puzzle designs in a few spots. And there aren't quite enough rewards for exploration like I'd hoped, with areas like the desert near the end feeling very barren of interaction or secrets off the expected path. But these all point to the constraints, low budget, and limited time Love-de-Lic had to realize a vision so ambitious that few are trying anything like it today. More privileged groups like mid-2000s Maxis struggled to realize their own comprehensive story of life growing from nothing and adapting to everything. And then there's fanciful but less compelling evolution legends such as EVO: The Search for Life and its PC-98 predecessor. Still I love those projects for their own ambitions, just as I've got nothing but love for L.O.L, warts and all.
Sadly the general public and most game fans either didn't know about it or had other priorities, leaving Love-de-Lic to disband and try their design approach elsewhere. How sad but fitting that any indelible interactive story this ahead of the times should find rejection until decades later. From what interviews and retrospectives we have, it seems as though Nishii, Sakamoto, and others understood this would be the company's end. There's no glory there, just a resignation to the harshness of the video games market and what it quickly excludes from view. All I want now is for you to try giving this a little love, too. Do for L.O.L. now what was improbable when it released into an uncaring media landscape all those years ago. For lack of a better answer to this indignity, I've ended up playing one of my new favorite games, and maybe you could too.
ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇꜱᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴜʀᴏᴘᴀ
ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛ ɴᴏ ʟᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ -quote from 2010: The Year We Make Contact
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023
If Moon RPG was a thesis polemic and UFO a dissertation, then Lack of Love was Kenichi Nishii & co.'s post-doctorate trial by fire. The era of overly experimental, often commercially unviable projects like this on PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and now Dreamcast was slowly in decline. Almost all the post-bubble era investment capital needed to support teams like them would filter increasingly into stable, more conservative groups and companies working on console games. In a sense, they saw themselves as a dying breed, the kind that gets stomped all over in this year-2000 cautionary tale. I'm just glad Ryuichi Sakamoto helped produce this and get it to market, especially given the system's poor performance in Japan. His music and environmentalist/anti-capitalist stance stick out at times throughout the story, but he's mainly taking a backseat and giving Love-de-Lic their last chance to create something this ambitious together. In all the years since, the studio's staff diaspora has led to countless other notable works, and parts of L.O.L. both hint at those while revealing what was lost.
We're far from Chibi-Robo or the Tingle spinoffs here, after all. Lack of Love shows unwavering confidence in the player's ability to roleplay as this evolving, invisibly sentient creature who experiences many worlds on one planet, both native and invasive. Every real or fake ecosystem we travel to, whether by accident or in search of respite, offers enough challenge, task variation, and indulgent audiovisuals to keep one going. I wish I could say that for more players, though. It might not reach the difficulty and obtuseness of much older graphic adventures from the Sierra and Infocom glory years, but I've seen enough people who like classic games bounce off this one to know it's a hard ask. You have no choice but to poke, prod, and solve each environment with verbs you'd normally never consider, such as simply sleeping in a spot for longer than feels comfortable or, well, interesting. It's more than beatable, but I won't begrudge anyone for watching this or relying on a walkthrough. LDL designed L.O.L to be dissected, not gulped down. Tellingly, though, the game starts and ends with a titanic beast possibly devouring you unless you act quickly, instinctively perhaps.
One moment that frustrated me, but also revealed the genius behind it all, was trying to race the bioluminescent flyers on level 5. By this point I've transformed a few times, having become a frilly flightless fellow with plenty of brawn and speed. Darting across this mixture of bizarre swamp, desert, and grassland terrain has led to what feels like a softlock, a set of plant walls I can only squeeze by if I use the right tool. Lack of Love succeeds in telegraphing points of interest for most puzzles, be it the obvious dirt starting line for the night races in this grove, or the cold and minimalistic off-world objects and structures seen later. What's never as obvious is how exactly to interact with other creatures for more complex tasks. Helping out by killing a larger bully or retrieving a parent's lost child is straightforward, but something as simple as just entering the race used a good hour of my time here. Oh sure, I could win the race all right…but it took way too long for the game to recognize and reward me, forcing another long wait from night to day and back again since there's only one lap a cycle.
I recognize that my impatience got in the way of just accepting this, one of life's many setbacks. So I simply waited all day and half a night to repeat the ritual until I got it right. A majority of L.O.L's dialogue with players and critics comes down to how it considers rituals, those habits justified & unjustified which define our daily lives. If anything, the interrogation of normalized behaviors, and the true intentions or lack of them hiding behind, define the studio's short career. As I gorged on helmet-headed stilt walkers and headbutted tree-nuts to slurp up their fruit, it dawned on me how well this game handles repetition. Many times did I get entranced into calling, roaring, and pissing all over each map to see if some cool event or interaction could happen where it'd make sense. Most of these levels are well-built for quickly crossing from one relevant hotspot to another. That desire to see it all through, no matter when I got humiliated or had to slog past something I'd solved but failed to do just right at just the right moment…it makes all of this worthwhile.
Progression throughout Lack of Love isn't usually this janky or unintuitive though. The game's main advancement system, the psychoballs you collect to activate evolution crystals, accounts for skipping the befriending process with some of your neighbors. It makes this a bit more replayable than usual for the genre, as you can leave solving the tougher riddles to a repeat run while continuing onward. I wish there wasn't anything as poorly built as this firefly race, or the somewhat tedious endgame marathon where your latest form can't run. But while that impedes the game's ambitions somewhat, it usually isn't a dealbreaker. LDL's crafted an impressive journey out of life's simplest moments, pleasures, and triumphs over adversity, from your humble start inside a hollow tree to the wastes of what the eponymous human resettling project has wrought. There's only a few "special" moves you can learn, from dashing to
In short, L.O.L. is a study of contrasts: the precious, vivacious yet forever dangerous wilds of this planet vs. the simpler, stable yet controlling allure of organized systems and societies. Nothing ever really works out in nature, not even for the apex predators like me. Yet everything has to work according to some plan or praxis in any form of civilization, something made possible through explicit communication. Love de Lic's challenge was to treat players with as much respect for their intelligence as possible before giving them something inscrutable—no straight line to triumph. This game had to feel alien, but still somehow understandable for its themes and messages to resonate. It's an unenviable goal for most developers. Just ask former LDL creators who have moved on to more manageable prospects. Obscurantism is a mixed blessing all throughout the experience, and I can't imagine this game any other way.
The opening level at least prepares you for the long, unwieldy pilgrimage to enlightenment through a few key ways. Popping out of the egg, swimming to shore, and the camera panning over a creature evolving via silver crystals gives a starting push. Then there's the initial "call for help", a newborn creature struggling to get up. Getting your first psychoball requires not aggression, but compassion for other ingenues like you. On the flipside, you end up having to kill a predator much larger and stronger than yourself, just to save harmless foragers. I definitely wish the game did a better job of avoiding this Manichean binary for more of the psychoball challenges, but it works well this early on. Maybe the initially weird, highly structured raise-the-mush-roof puzzle west of start was a hint of more involved sequences either planned or cut down a bit
Crucially, the following several stages demonstrate how Lack of Love's alien earth is far from some arcadian paradise. The game simply does not judge you for turning traitor and consuming the same species you just helped out; regaining their trust is usually just as easy. One look at the sun-cracked, footstep-ravaged wasteland outside your cradle portends further ordeals. LDL still wants you to succeed, however. The start menu offers not only maps + your current location for most levels, but a controls how-to and, most importantly, a bestiary screen. It's here where each character's name offers some hint, small or strong, pointing you towards the right mindset for solving their puzzle. Matching these key names with key locations works out immediately, as I figured out with the "shy-shore peeper" swimming around the level perimeter. Likewise, the next stage brought me to a labyrinth of fungi, spider mites, and two confused gnome-y guys who I could choose to reunite. Taking the world in at your own pace, then proceeding through an emotional understanding each environment—it's like learning how to breathe again.
L.O.L finds a sustainable cadence of shorter intro levels, quick interludes, and larger, multi-part affairs, often split up further by your evolution path. Giving three or five psychoballs to the crystal altars sends you on a path of no return, growing larger or more powerful and sometimes losing access to creatures you may or may not have aided. The music-box pupating and subsequent analog spinning to exit your shell always pits a grin on my face. Rather than just being punctuation for a numbers game (ex. Chao raising in Sonic Adventure, much as I love it), every evolution marks a new chapter in the game's broader story, where what you gain or lose with any form mirrors the existential and environmental challenges you've faced. As we transition from the insect world to small mammals and beyond, the heal-or-kill extremes ramp up, as do the level designs. I wouldn't call Love-de-Lic's game particularly mazy or intricate to navigate, but I learned to consult the map for puzzles or sleeping to activate the minimap radar so I could find prey. It'd be easy for this evolve-and-solve formula to get stale or ironically artificial, yet LDL avoids this for nearly the whole runtime!
Early hours of traipsing around a violent but truly honest little universe give way to a mysterious mid-game in which L.O.L. project puppet Halumi intervenes in the great chain of being. An impossibly clean, retro-futurist doll of a destroyer plops down TVs in two levels, each showing a countdown to…something big. Nothing good, that's for sure, and especially not for the unsuspecting locals you've been trying to live with. So far it's mostly just been a couple short tunes and Hirofumi Taniguchi's predictably fascinating sound design for a soundscape, but now the iconic tune "Artificial Paradise" starts droning in the background. Musical ambiance turns to music as a suite, a choreographed piece overriding the vocals and cries you know best. Then the terraformer bots come, and the game introduces another stylistic dalliance: the disaster movie removed from civilization. We've gone from colorful, inviting, mutualistic landscapes to invaded craggy rocksides, a very survival horror-ish insect hive where you play Amida with worker bugs, and a suspiciously utopian "final home" for our alien cat and others just like us.
The final levels satisfyingly wrap all these loose threads into a narrative on the ease with which precarious lives and ecology fall prey to not just the horrors of colonization, but the loss of that mystery needed to keep life worth living. Neither you nor the last creatures you help or save have time or dignity left as the L.O.L. project faces its own consequences, radiating across the world in turn. But I'm familiar with that shared dread and understanding of what it's all coming to, as someone living through destructive climate change my whole lifetime. How does one carry on in a land you remember functioning before it was poisoned? What can family, friends, mutual interests, etc. do against the tide of sheer, uncaring war or collapse?
There's a definite rage hiding behind Love-de-Lic's minimalist approach, only rising to the surface at the game's climax. You can taste the proverbial cookie baked with arsenic, a barbed attitude towards living through these times after growing up hoping and expecting a bright tomorrow. To make it out of this world alive takes a lot of seriousness, but also heart and a sense of humor, which Lack of Love never lets you forget. The ending sequence had me beyond relieved, overjoyed yet mournful about how no environmentalist hero's journey of this sort seems to work beyond the plane of fiction. Is it a lack of love consuming us, or the forced dispersion of it? L.O.L. justifiably refuses to give a clear answer, something even its developers are searching for. It's not the most sophisticated kind of optimistic nihilism anyone's imbued in a work, but a very fitting choice for this adventure.
Plot and thematic spoilers ahead
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Friendship, whether convenient or desirable on its own, becomes even more important during the second robot attack you suffer through. A mutual species has been living with your newfound family, and one of these more plant-/shroom-shaped fellows is still mourning their dead feline pal near the bottom of the map. Yet again, though, rituals and routines like the egg worship above supplant the ignored pain and due diligence owed in this community. Shoving the guy away from an incoming bulldozer, only to get squashed yourself, is the most you end up doing in this apocalypse. It only gets worse after awakening not in the natural world, but an eerie facsimile of it, built aboard the L.O.L. spaceship that we saw dive into the planet with a virus' silhouette. Even highly-evolved lifeforms, now able to talk in bursts and build a structured society, lose sight and make mistakes. But only humanity can play God for these fauna and flora, such that you're imprisoned in a hell superficially resembling home.
Gone are the toils of comprehending other species, or stumbling haphazardly through situations that should have killed you long ago. All that Halumi and the humans want from you, their obscure object of desire, is to pass basic push-and-pull block mazes. Imagine sitting down for your high school exams, having studied the world and its intricacies for so long, only for them to hand you an arcane IQ test. There's no assumption of ecological intelligence in the robot's data banks or AI model, just a delight in watching you wriggle through Backrooms Sokoban. Halumi merely chuckles as you clear each room, then lures you into an abstract abyss of phosphenes just to play tag. We then watch the banal. comically on-the-nose mission video recounting humanity's failure to manage their own planet and ecosystem, meaning they must export their hopes, dreams, waste, and destruction to another. Some reward for getting this far in a contrived, worthless series of "tests" they're apparently obligated to perform.
And you'll quickly notice your suffering isn't that unique, either. The quote-unquote habitat caging you is policed by Halumi's robots and, more bizarrely, flying baby androids dispensing this game's send-up of pet food. It's clearly nothing too healthy or appropriate for the menagerie of organic inhabitants imprisoned on this ark. They're literally shitting themselves everywhere they go after eating! And those who fail the tests get treated as literal waste, too. Falling into the scrap closet, with its once-pristine walls peeling and the remaining animals suffering without dignity, shows the depths that this whole "sustainable" planetary resettlement program has sunk to. Some might say the game gets much too unsubtle at this point, which I can agree with. But given the current state of poaching, zoos-as-businesses, habitat displacement, industrial ranching, and careless pet adoption in our own world, maybe these messages work best when they're blunt. Halumi forcing his units to not kill, study, and presumably burn you up after just for failing a test is perhaps the only sign of remorse this antiseptic dungeon offers.
Impressing Halumi with each test comes to a head when we're given a Hobson's choice: the hilariously, insultingly ugly baby-bot or the friend we had sacrificed our safety for back in the pridelands. Predictably, you get thrown in the trash again for making the better choice. Choosing the infant, and all that humanity represents through Halumi and their army, merely makes you a glorified pet for the robot, stuck in the same fancy hotel room as two other dubiously lucky critters (plus Dave Bowman on the bed, out of camera—IDK, this feels like a 2001 reference just as much as the game's intro). Did I mention we haven't evolved for quite a while now? Guess what you become next: an awkward, baleful mirror of the baby from earlier, unable to run and too oversized for these new comforts purportedly made with kids in mind.
No one's at home here, not even the robots if that's even a concept they're built to comprehend (which I doubt). We may be out of hell, but this purgatory isn't much better. After helping the alligator with the shower and the flowery bloke with table manners, the soft but melancholy downtempo lounge of Sakamoto's "Dream" rings out from the hi-fi stereo. Beyond being one of my new favorite melodic ambient songs in any soundtrack, it perfectly conveys how much these "successful" test animals have lost, something we're used to even as we resist the circumstances. It's their last respite, just as playing this game might, for some, be an escape from our own degrading world in which we're seemingly powerless to stop the bleeding.
To the master robot's credit, they aren't too keen on keeping us here at all costs. Halumi's got big plans to fulfill, as they're quick to shoo us off from the ship's bridge. A quick peek outside the rocket shows the beginnings of an American-style highway going nowhere good, and an abnormal dust storm blowing every which way. I tried looking at my map here and found, to both horror and amusement, that there is no map at this point in Lack of Love. The protagonist's been disconnected from the outside world for so long, and exposed to the hubris and demystification of these captors, that only what intuition's left can lead the way out of here. L.O.L gives you compelling, frustrating predicament: stay in the Artificial Paradise—the map of the realm consuming the realm itself, Borges' fabled copy corrupting and then replacing the original—or finish your pilgrimage, an impossible trek through a ruined, desiccated, hopeless bastardization of home?
LDL already knows I'm going to press onward. That’s what they taught me, this new citizen of the earth, right from the start! And of course it's painful, having nothing to feed on as I crawl desperately towards a far-off exit, saving a primate friend in the process. But hope re-emerges when reuniting with that friend from the village, waiting so long to see if we're okay. The story's optimistic views on mutualism within anarchy finally collide with all the forced order and folly of its antagonists. Few moments in video games feel as biting and final as this last set-piece, a forced run away from falling tectonic plates as the L.O.L project finally collapses under the weight of all its systemic damage to the planet. We also have one last metamorphosis, saving you from death by hunger and replacing the corrupted infant form with one resembling an early human, alternating between running on twos and fours. All the player's achievements, elation, and suffering have built up to this, whether there's survival or mere death waiting at the end.
In the end, L.O.L. opts for a happy ending it's done everything to suggest can't happen. The planet rejects the virus, despite having deteriorated so much it loses its magnetic field. All of Halumi and the robots' systems suffer systemic collapse, preventing much more fatal consequences had they continued sapping the global lifeforce. Most importantly, our "hero" and boon companion crest the mountain in time to witness god rays breaking through the storm that had slowed us and threatened doom. I put hero in quotes because, just as with Moon RPG a few years prior, Nishii can't let us leave this fantasy as models to be revered, icons of victory beyond reproach. Even our protagonist had to invade, predate, and take from others their tokens of trust and acceptance, all to reach this point. But in an imperfect reality, this hardly makes us the villain either. This remarkably smart, courageous, and wise duo prevailed against odds not to prove something or selfishly leave this world behind, but to support each other during an eschatological nightmare. Just as that lack of love nearly ruined this world, the overwhelming abundance of it is finally enough to get you and someone else through the end times. Even if it didn't work, would it not have been worth it?
Our story passes on into collective memory, but Halumi's is just beginning. They're an embarrassment to their creators' hopes and whims, the once innocuous but now disgraced mascot of colonialism. Moreover, bots like Halumi and the minions are simply expendable metal to forge anew. L.O.L. ain't gonna stop at just one failure on a single planet, not with humanity's future at stake. So they'll try their luck elsewhere, and probably destroy that wandering rock in the name of civilization. But not this world. This once dominant predator from the heavens is just another vulnerable denizen now, and that's what frees them. The giant who once wielded an army and crushed all biomes to bits now gingerly steers clear of the smallest critter it meets. Halumi's learned to love the world as it is, not from orders on high or as a sandbox to redevelop. And so the circle of life incorporates one more host, a guilty conscience on the way to carving a new, more empathetic destiny from what's left.
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End of spoilers
One has to wonder how delicately and effortlessly this game touches on something as complicated as anarchy vs. hierarchy. Both protagonist and antagonist ultimately seek a place in their world: a mercurial, fluid entity among the bio-sprawl, or a cybernetic King Canute damming the primordial ocean of life and commanding its tides. There's a clear throughline from Moon RPG's evil-hero-good-interloper dynamic to the equivalent in this game, but L.O.L. sees room for redemption. It avoids the easy pessimism this premise could thrive upon, albeit not by asserting humanity's exceptionalism in the face of catastrophe. Halumi's just one more anthropomorphic tool exploited by the powers that be to accomplish their foolhardy wars on worlds they think are beneath them. This weaponized cuteness only works until the illusion of respectability or shared gain has evaporated; now they're just a tin can ready to rust away on an abandoned Eden. It's time to stop fighting. It's time to survive.
Lack of Love leaves me wanting despite all that it's evoked from me. Another late-game stage expanding on the prairie village's growing pains, and the tensions between tribe mentality and complex new hierarchies, would have made me rate this even higher. The best bits sometimes get drowned over tetchy player controls, or poorly telegraphed puzzle designs in a few spots. And there aren't quite enough rewards for exploration like I'd hoped, with areas like the desert near the end feeling very barren of interaction or secrets off the expected path. But these all point to the constraints, low budget, and limited time Love-de-Lic had to realize a vision so ambitious that few are trying anything like it today. More privileged groups like mid-2000s Maxis struggled to realize their own comprehensive story of life growing from nothing and adapting to everything. And then there's fanciful but less compelling evolution legends such as EVO: The Search for Life and its PC-98 predecessor. Still I love those projects for their own ambitions, just as I've got nothing but love for L.O.L, warts and all.
Sadly the general public and most game fans either didn't know about it or had other priorities, leaving Love-de-Lic to disband and try their design approach elsewhere. How sad but fitting that any indelible interactive story this ahead of the times should find rejection until decades later. From what interviews and retrospectives we have, it seems as though Nishii, Sakamoto, and others understood this would be the company's end. There's no glory there, just a resignation to the harshness of the video games market and what it quickly excludes from view. All I want now is for you to try giving this a little love, too. Do for L.O.L. now what was improbable when it released into an uncaring media landscape all those years ago. For lack of a better answer to this indignity, I've ended up playing one of my new favorite games, and maybe you could too.
ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇꜱᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴜʀᴏᴘᴀ
ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛ ɴᴏ ʟᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ -quote from 2010: The Year We Make Contact
Reviewed on Feb 21, 2023