Lucius III is one of the most bafflingly misguided games I've ever played, a game so deeply rooted in its developer's shortcomings that the only things going for it have little to do with the game itself. If the first game failed to be more than a myopic summary of its influences with gore instead of paragraphs, and the second game failed to ingratiate the crowd that saw the limitations of that, Lucius III is nothing. It is offensive, poorly constructed, outdated, and, worst of all, boring. Shiver Games clearly bit off more than they could chew here, and, as a result, I cannot recommend Lucius III as more than a cautionary tale about ambitious overreach. A shell of its former self, the only thing Lucius III manages to accomplish is becoming its developer's least compelling work to date.
Perhaps the biggest failure in the careers of all five employed during development, Lucius III wastes your time on a narrative that only manages to flounder the goodwill earned through its premise. On paper, the intention is noble. Lucius was a gothic B-Movie that you'd see on cable television late one afternoon. The tale of a family's disintegration and the player's involvement held little to the imagination, bringing no profundity to the action on screen. Similarly, its successor is a story about betrayal and destruction told with seventh-grade reading comprehension. Story isn't a concern with this series; it's meant to be stupid and enjoyable popcorn entertainment for horror enthusiasts to chew on. And this is the first area where Lucius III immediately shoots itself in the foot: the developers tried here. Cutscenes don't have the violent kineticism they did in the first game, instead choosing to be more static in nature. The game sets the stage for a darker, moodier take on the universe than established previously. Then, it does something incomprehensibly dumb and undoes that with impeccable timing. Lucius was not a god in the first game. All of the deaths you had to orchestrate relied on clumsy handheld appliances perfect for the rich and ignorant. In the second game, you have to earn all of your powers from the ground up. But in Lucius III, the power scale is all messed up. The first kill in this is probably the worst of the lot, if only because it absolutely murders any expectations you might have been hanging onto. All it takes for the titular antichrist to obliterate someone is a lack of biblical imagery in the same room and bloodstained determination. From the moment Lucius is able to kill the mayor by magically separating his skull from his head, any attempt at a new direction for this floundering trilogy is thrown aside. Narratively, kills are rarely ever given any attention after the fact. Sometimes, it's intentional; "they won't miss this guy, and they think he's going out of town." But you can also kill five children; their parents never grieve for their loss or act worried about their disappearance. The perfect stay-at-home mother who is always in the kitchen cooking something for her offspring still has the handle of a frypan in her hand if you decide to go to her house after massacring the people that food is meant for en masse. There's never a moment where you click on a character, and they say something like, "don't worry, Lucius, she's in a better place now." Moments like that were commonplace in the original game, but the scale of III dwarfs most transparently. Part of that scale is supposed to be a more fleshed-out story with rich characters. Lucius III follows Lucius as he pairs with McGuffin, formerly a detective sent to investigate his various murders in the original game. The two are buddy-buddy now, but there's a catch: McGuffin is mourning the loss of his partner and child. His son, who died in the same freak accident his wife did, looks almost identical to Lucius. And this is where things go from bad to significantly worse. The premise of Lucius III is so rich with thematic potential that, had it been handled by another developer, might have had the opportunity to become one of the greatest horror stories ever told in a game. The story, as told by Shiver Games, has nary a twist to its name. It's horribly offensive for the sake of shock value alone. Since I didn't put a content warning on this review, I can't describe just how bad it gets. Rest assured, it outdoes BioShock Infinite in terms of wrongfully appropriating historical context in just one scene alone. But the biggest sin of all is that it never questions the ethics of the relationship at its core with more than a cursory glance. A premise like this brings to mind ideas of morality and moral relativism, mortality, religious contradiction, and the human condition. But by completely disregarding any introspection on its core duo, the only question it manages to make you ask is why you're still playing. By all accounts, Lucius III should be McGuffin's story, but he's relegated to cutscenes where a lot of his personality comes off as one-dimensional due to shoddy character writing and worse voice direction. The one scene where he's allowed to grieve is short-lived and unintentionally hilarious. Whether it was a lack of budget or trying that made the developers unable to hire a woman to voice act a few short lines, the result is that they ended up using a free Text-To-Speech program for a dramatic scene. What should come off as slightly harrowing instead feels hysterically absurd and wholly indicative of how incredibly rushed production had to be. But the effectiveness of that scene is amputated by an entirely different beast: the cutscenes in Lucius III are given worse direction than anything else this series has offered. Remember the kinetic energy I mentioned the first game had? There are shots in Lucius III that don't follow the rule of thirds. Other shots cut off abruptly, and when it's not breaking fundamental rules of composition, everything looks awkward and stilted. There's one moment near the end that looks jaw-dropping and picturesque, but that's the only time this game ever stunned me with its cinematics. Past that, the final act of Lucius III is so contrived and relies far too heavily on character revelations that are off-screen that any momentum gained in earlier areas of the game is stopped dead in its tracks. It doesn't help that McGuffin is the only slightly compelling character in a sea of tropes presented as individuals and that his presence in the story comes to just as abrupt of a stop. Lucius III is a game that starts with a series of tantalizing questions and ends with one of the most profoundly disappointing "what if"s I've ever seen in a game. It says a lot that the content that apparently had to be cut from this for it to make a final release would never have redeemed it, even by an inch. It was not a lack of budget, resources, time, and enthusiasm that shot Lucius III's narrative in broad daylight, nor could it hope to be. All of those things combined could never have forced the writer to use the word cunt within the first two hours of its runtime to make up for the fact that no F-Bombs were ever dropped in the first game and believe that it somehow represents the series taking a more serious, moody angle. Lucius III's narrative is enveloped in a lack of perspective, and thus its big ideas immediately stumble before they ever get the chance to stand on their own. I wish I could say that the story is the only area where this issue persists, but as you keep playing Lucius III, it eventually dawns on you that its lack of perspective does not come to define its narrative failings; it comes to define the entire experience instead.
Even by the lax standards of adventure games, Lucius III is an archaic and confusing mess that bizarrely manages to stand behind its predecessors. The prologue hands you a camera and tasks you with taking pictures of the main cast to keep in a journal you use to track your progress. That camera isn't used again, and you can't technically take pictures with it. It's only used as a prop to trigger a cutscene. This is where another comparison to the first game rears its head. One of the puzzles in the original game has you taking a picture of two people having sex so you can blackmail one of the maids into suicide. You can take as many photos as you want, and each one is considered a physical object. It's not a detail that matters all that much in the grand scheme of things, but it's one tiny detail in a sea of them that make the Dante Manor feel alive. Consider the fact that Lucius III is an Open World game. It should be brimming with those small details, yet the only objects you can hold are the ones in your inventory. But even by the standards of traditional adventure games, it's not up to snuff. You can't combine objects in your inventory. You can pick up objects to use later on other objects, making puzzle solving feel like a tedious checklist of going to the right place and using the correct object. I assume that it's a decision made primarily to cut down on one of the staples of the adventure genre. You can't combine everything in your inventory to get the right tool if it's not in the game. But this does nothing to cut down on pixel hunting. Keen observers might spot a toy robot in Lucius's room, but it's so easy to walk past that you might not even know you have to interact with it to solve a puzzle. Verbatim, this is a repeat mistake from one of the puzzles in the original game. Forget interacting with a toy robot; did you check the fridge? One of the most significant issues with turning Lucius into an Open World game is that it means the guesswork becomes less rewarding. The item you need to solve a puzzle might be in one house, let alone two or three, and you wouldn't know it unless you decided to click on everything before you needed to. The problem with many adventure games like this is that a core part of them is interacting with objects whose purpose isn't defined until later, lest you feel like the game has cheated you in any way. Lucius's attempts to modernize the formula by putting it through a cinematic framework never addressed this issue, only deciding on making the space you were playing in limited to one location. Lucius III could benefit from the reinvention that the first game teased but instead decides to give you something vaguely similar in an environment that's harder to keep track of. And then there's platforming. That sentence should evoke dread in anyone, and it's no different here. It's pointless and frustrating to deal with, and the animations for it hit a new low in a series "renowned" for how janky its animation is. The animation isn't the only part of Lucius III that scratches through the bottom of a barrel with wood rot; the character models, for one, look fucking hideous. Contrary to how atrocious the voice acting is for them, the children of Lucius III got lucky. Anyone who isn't a child is uncomfortable to look at, which is fitting for this game in a way that's too uncomfortable for me to divulge (the children in this game are treated horribly). The experience of having to go to a place to talk to the redhead who has a cigarette super glued to his lip so he can make a hand gesture in the most robotic way possible is repellant enough for me to consider the charm of the developer's lacking talent completely absent.
But let's say you can forgive the narrative dribble and unimaginative gameplay. This game has an Open World, and that might draw you in. Lucius III is many things, but it is not technically competent enough to pull an Open World off. The only thing that manages to be impressive about it is that they tried. The map may be small, but they've managed to pack an impressive amount of variety into it. Although it's evident when they have to reuse a few models every now and then, each locale looks different from the last one you were in. There are neighborhoods, churches by the sea and stores that rest by the doc, a police station right next to an industrial-looking tower, and fields of long grass to walk through. It's hard to admire all of this, though, when the draw distance makes far-off areas look like they're a part of Silent Hill. Only, they're not covered by fog. No such attempt is made to mask technical limitations, and it fails to embalm what is, otherwise, a lifeless world. Exploration feels arbitrary and rarely rewards you with anything tangible. The developers tried to get around this by giving the player the option to explore the world through the eyes of a crow, but controlling the crow feels stiff, and the player isn't discouraged from stocking up an absurd number of crow hearts by gathering them every time a crow respawns. The best way to experience the map of Winter Hill is to take advantage of your Crow hearts to unlock all of the fast travel points in quick succession, so you spend less time wandering the long roads between Point A to Point B. On one hand, this completely removes any incentive to use the crow hearts. But on the other hand, it's entirely justified, and I challenge anybody who says otherwise to give me a valid reason as to why that's the case. It doesn't matter if that person exists; exploring Winter Hill exhausted me to the point where my desire to replay this game begins and ends with watching somebody else do it on YouTube, so the boredom is mutual.
Unfortunately, things do not fare entirely well from a technical perspective. The good news is that it's not entirely disastrous (and my earlier claims that it were were inflammatory and hyperbolic). It's just not very good. Easily its biggest drawback is the concerning amount of pop-in that you'll encounter while exploring the open world. Fields that are supposed to feel taller than you and more imposing than even the most devious of your murderous powers fail to impress as the game cannot render more than a circle of the grass you're running around in while it's in view. During kill scenes, props and sometimes entire locations appear out of thin air. It's fitting that the town's name is an obvious homage to Silent Hill because a hefty dollop of fog is the only thing that could have saved the developer's evidently limited ability to pull off a continuous game world on more than an aesthetic level. Sound design is all over the place. In certain areas, looking away from someone who's talking by an inch will cause the game to act like they're speaking to you from an entirely separate location. In terms of glitches and oversights, they're mostly small, but they're numerous. In my experience, it was impossible to play with this with a controller. Plugging a controller in would result in the camera continuously drifting on a horizontal plane, regardless of what controller was plugged in and whether or not the controller was in use. I got stuck in backyards with barely noticeable exits, and, even if the redesigned and streamlined powers, took a good minute or two to figure out the mechanics of fire. All of this is to say that Lucius III is playable from start to finish but still far from ideal.
The "good" parts of Lucius III, the things I alluded to at the start of this review, feel so small compared to everything else. The particle effects look great here, and when the HDR effects aren't making a bright room look dark for no apparent reason, the lighting can be pretty good, too. But it would be ridiculous of me not to mention that these things are part of the engine the developers chose to use, which they had no hand in creating. There's also a fantastic cover of The Animals' House of the Rising Sun, which is so good that it transcends the game it's in, and I strongly suggest you give it a listen when you have the time. Once again, the developers had no hand in creating that cover. The music they created, though, isn't all that bad. This is the one thing I'll be willing to give to them; the only reason this game has such an ominous and adventurous vibe to it is because the music is surprisingly good.
And now for the final question that all three of these reviews have been leading up to: do I feel bad for these developers? I certainly felt bad after playing Lucius II. That being said, after playing Lucius II, I had less patience for III's shortcomings. And after playing Lucius Demake, that was solidified. Ultimately, I wish these developers the best, but I can't say I'm giddy with anticipation for what they might make next... maybe. Sales figures for this have never been released, but I think it's safe to say there isn't going to be a Lucius IV anytime soon. When this came out, I saw more than a few comments befuddled by its existence. I saw people buy the game to write negative reviews for things that were in the trailer. It all just begs the question: how niche is too niche? I shouldn't pity it, but secretly, I do.
(If you would like to see how I feel about the other games in this series, please feel free to check out my list ranking them from best to worst).
Perhaps the biggest failure in the careers of all five employed during development, Lucius III wastes your time on a narrative that only manages to flounder the goodwill earned through its premise. On paper, the intention is noble. Lucius was a gothic B-Movie that you'd see on cable television late one afternoon. The tale of a family's disintegration and the player's involvement held little to the imagination, bringing no profundity to the action on screen. Similarly, its successor is a story about betrayal and destruction told with seventh-grade reading comprehension. Story isn't a concern with this series; it's meant to be stupid and enjoyable popcorn entertainment for horror enthusiasts to chew on. And this is the first area where Lucius III immediately shoots itself in the foot: the developers tried here. Cutscenes don't have the violent kineticism they did in the first game, instead choosing to be more static in nature. The game sets the stage for a darker, moodier take on the universe than established previously. Then, it does something incomprehensibly dumb and undoes that with impeccable timing. Lucius was not a god in the first game. All of the deaths you had to orchestrate relied on clumsy handheld appliances perfect for the rich and ignorant. In the second game, you have to earn all of your powers from the ground up. But in Lucius III, the power scale is all messed up. The first kill in this is probably the worst of the lot, if only because it absolutely murders any expectations you might have been hanging onto. All it takes for the titular antichrist to obliterate someone is a lack of biblical imagery in the same room and bloodstained determination. From the moment Lucius is able to kill the mayor by magically separating his skull from his head, any attempt at a new direction for this floundering trilogy is thrown aside. Narratively, kills are rarely ever given any attention after the fact. Sometimes, it's intentional; "they won't miss this guy, and they think he's going out of town." But you can also kill five children; their parents never grieve for their loss or act worried about their disappearance. The perfect stay-at-home mother who is always in the kitchen cooking something for her offspring still has the handle of a frypan in her hand if you decide to go to her house after massacring the people that food is meant for en masse. There's never a moment where you click on a character, and they say something like, "don't worry, Lucius, she's in a better place now." Moments like that were commonplace in the original game, but the scale of III dwarfs most transparently. Part of that scale is supposed to be a more fleshed-out story with rich characters. Lucius III follows Lucius as he pairs with McGuffin, formerly a detective sent to investigate his various murders in the original game. The two are buddy-buddy now, but there's a catch: McGuffin is mourning the loss of his partner and child. His son, who died in the same freak accident his wife did, looks almost identical to Lucius. And this is where things go from bad to significantly worse. The premise of Lucius III is so rich with thematic potential that, had it been handled by another developer, might have had the opportunity to become one of the greatest horror stories ever told in a game. The story, as told by Shiver Games, has nary a twist to its name. It's horribly offensive for the sake of shock value alone. Since I didn't put a content warning on this review, I can't describe just how bad it gets. Rest assured, it outdoes BioShock Infinite in terms of wrongfully appropriating historical context in just one scene alone. But the biggest sin of all is that it never questions the ethics of the relationship at its core with more than a cursory glance. A premise like this brings to mind ideas of morality and moral relativism, mortality, religious contradiction, and the human condition. But by completely disregarding any introspection on its core duo, the only question it manages to make you ask is why you're still playing. By all accounts, Lucius III should be McGuffin's story, but he's relegated to cutscenes where a lot of his personality comes off as one-dimensional due to shoddy character writing and worse voice direction. The one scene where he's allowed to grieve is short-lived and unintentionally hilarious. Whether it was a lack of budget or trying that made the developers unable to hire a woman to voice act a few short lines, the result is that they ended up using a free Text-To-Speech program for a dramatic scene. What should come off as slightly harrowing instead feels hysterically absurd and wholly indicative of how incredibly rushed production had to be. But the effectiveness of that scene is amputated by an entirely different beast: the cutscenes in Lucius III are given worse direction than anything else this series has offered. Remember the kinetic energy I mentioned the first game had? There are shots in Lucius III that don't follow the rule of thirds. Other shots cut off abruptly, and when it's not breaking fundamental rules of composition, everything looks awkward and stilted. There's one moment near the end that looks jaw-dropping and picturesque, but that's the only time this game ever stunned me with its cinematics. Past that, the final act of Lucius III is so contrived and relies far too heavily on character revelations that are off-screen that any momentum gained in earlier areas of the game is stopped dead in its tracks. It doesn't help that McGuffin is the only slightly compelling character in a sea of tropes presented as individuals and that his presence in the story comes to just as abrupt of a stop. Lucius III is a game that starts with a series of tantalizing questions and ends with one of the most profoundly disappointing "what if"s I've ever seen in a game. It says a lot that the content that apparently had to be cut from this for it to make a final release would never have redeemed it, even by an inch. It was not a lack of budget, resources, time, and enthusiasm that shot Lucius III's narrative in broad daylight, nor could it hope to be. All of those things combined could never have forced the writer to use the word cunt within the first two hours of its runtime to make up for the fact that no F-Bombs were ever dropped in the first game and believe that it somehow represents the series taking a more serious, moody angle. Lucius III's narrative is enveloped in a lack of perspective, and thus its big ideas immediately stumble before they ever get the chance to stand on their own. I wish I could say that the story is the only area where this issue persists, but as you keep playing Lucius III, it eventually dawns on you that its lack of perspective does not come to define its narrative failings; it comes to define the entire experience instead.
Even by the lax standards of adventure games, Lucius III is an archaic and confusing mess that bizarrely manages to stand behind its predecessors. The prologue hands you a camera and tasks you with taking pictures of the main cast to keep in a journal you use to track your progress. That camera isn't used again, and you can't technically take pictures with it. It's only used as a prop to trigger a cutscene. This is where another comparison to the first game rears its head. One of the puzzles in the original game has you taking a picture of two people having sex so you can blackmail one of the maids into suicide. You can take as many photos as you want, and each one is considered a physical object. It's not a detail that matters all that much in the grand scheme of things, but it's one tiny detail in a sea of them that make the Dante Manor feel alive. Consider the fact that Lucius III is an Open World game. It should be brimming with those small details, yet the only objects you can hold are the ones in your inventory. But even by the standards of traditional adventure games, it's not up to snuff. You can't combine objects in your inventory. You can pick up objects to use later on other objects, making puzzle solving feel like a tedious checklist of going to the right place and using the correct object. I assume that it's a decision made primarily to cut down on one of the staples of the adventure genre. You can't combine everything in your inventory to get the right tool if it's not in the game. But this does nothing to cut down on pixel hunting. Keen observers might spot a toy robot in Lucius's room, but it's so easy to walk past that you might not even know you have to interact with it to solve a puzzle. Verbatim, this is a repeat mistake from one of the puzzles in the original game. Forget interacting with a toy robot; did you check the fridge? One of the most significant issues with turning Lucius into an Open World game is that it means the guesswork becomes less rewarding. The item you need to solve a puzzle might be in one house, let alone two or three, and you wouldn't know it unless you decided to click on everything before you needed to. The problem with many adventure games like this is that a core part of them is interacting with objects whose purpose isn't defined until later, lest you feel like the game has cheated you in any way. Lucius's attempts to modernize the formula by putting it through a cinematic framework never addressed this issue, only deciding on making the space you were playing in limited to one location. Lucius III could benefit from the reinvention that the first game teased but instead decides to give you something vaguely similar in an environment that's harder to keep track of. And then there's platforming. That sentence should evoke dread in anyone, and it's no different here. It's pointless and frustrating to deal with, and the animations for it hit a new low in a series "renowned" for how janky its animation is. The animation isn't the only part of Lucius III that scratches through the bottom of a barrel with wood rot; the character models, for one, look fucking hideous. Contrary to how atrocious the voice acting is for them, the children of Lucius III got lucky. Anyone who isn't a child is uncomfortable to look at, which is fitting for this game in a way that's too uncomfortable for me to divulge (the children in this game are treated horribly). The experience of having to go to a place to talk to the redhead who has a cigarette super glued to his lip so he can make a hand gesture in the most robotic way possible is repellant enough for me to consider the charm of the developer's lacking talent completely absent.
But let's say you can forgive the narrative dribble and unimaginative gameplay. This game has an Open World, and that might draw you in. Lucius III is many things, but it is not technically competent enough to pull an Open World off. The only thing that manages to be impressive about it is that they tried. The map may be small, but they've managed to pack an impressive amount of variety into it. Although it's evident when they have to reuse a few models every now and then, each locale looks different from the last one you were in. There are neighborhoods, churches by the sea and stores that rest by the doc, a police station right next to an industrial-looking tower, and fields of long grass to walk through. It's hard to admire all of this, though, when the draw distance makes far-off areas look like they're a part of Silent Hill. Only, they're not covered by fog. No such attempt is made to mask technical limitations, and it fails to embalm what is, otherwise, a lifeless world. Exploration feels arbitrary and rarely rewards you with anything tangible. The developers tried to get around this by giving the player the option to explore the world through the eyes of a crow, but controlling the crow feels stiff, and the player isn't discouraged from stocking up an absurd number of crow hearts by gathering them every time a crow respawns. The best way to experience the map of Winter Hill is to take advantage of your Crow hearts to unlock all of the fast travel points in quick succession, so you spend less time wandering the long roads between Point A to Point B. On one hand, this completely removes any incentive to use the crow hearts. But on the other hand, it's entirely justified, and I challenge anybody who says otherwise to give me a valid reason as to why that's the case. It doesn't matter if that person exists; exploring Winter Hill exhausted me to the point where my desire to replay this game begins and ends with watching somebody else do it on YouTube, so the boredom is mutual.
Unfortunately, things do not fare entirely well from a technical perspective. The good news is that it's not entirely disastrous (and my earlier claims that it were were inflammatory and hyperbolic). It's just not very good. Easily its biggest drawback is the concerning amount of pop-in that you'll encounter while exploring the open world. Fields that are supposed to feel taller than you and more imposing than even the most devious of your murderous powers fail to impress as the game cannot render more than a circle of the grass you're running around in while it's in view. During kill scenes, props and sometimes entire locations appear out of thin air. It's fitting that the town's name is an obvious homage to Silent Hill because a hefty dollop of fog is the only thing that could have saved the developer's evidently limited ability to pull off a continuous game world on more than an aesthetic level. Sound design is all over the place. In certain areas, looking away from someone who's talking by an inch will cause the game to act like they're speaking to you from an entirely separate location. In terms of glitches and oversights, they're mostly small, but they're numerous. In my experience, it was impossible to play with this with a controller. Plugging a controller in would result in the camera continuously drifting on a horizontal plane, regardless of what controller was plugged in and whether or not the controller was in use. I got stuck in backyards with barely noticeable exits, and, even if the redesigned and streamlined powers, took a good minute or two to figure out the mechanics of fire. All of this is to say that Lucius III is playable from start to finish but still far from ideal.
The "good" parts of Lucius III, the things I alluded to at the start of this review, feel so small compared to everything else. The particle effects look great here, and when the HDR effects aren't making a bright room look dark for no apparent reason, the lighting can be pretty good, too. But it would be ridiculous of me not to mention that these things are part of the engine the developers chose to use, which they had no hand in creating. There's also a fantastic cover of The Animals' House of the Rising Sun, which is so good that it transcends the game it's in, and I strongly suggest you give it a listen when you have the time. Once again, the developers had no hand in creating that cover. The music they created, though, isn't all that bad. This is the one thing I'll be willing to give to them; the only reason this game has such an ominous and adventurous vibe to it is because the music is surprisingly good.
And now for the final question that all three of these reviews have been leading up to: do I feel bad for these developers? I certainly felt bad after playing Lucius II. That being said, after playing Lucius II, I had less patience for III's shortcomings. And after playing Lucius Demake, that was solidified. Ultimately, I wish these developers the best, but I can't say I'm giddy with anticipation for what they might make next... maybe. Sales figures for this have never been released, but I think it's safe to say there isn't going to be a Lucius IV anytime soon. When this came out, I saw more than a few comments befuddled by its existence. I saw people buy the game to write negative reviews for things that were in the trailer. It all just begs the question: how niche is too niche? I shouldn't pity it, but secretly, I do.
(If you would like to see how I feel about the other games in this series, please feel free to check out my list ranking them from best to worst).
Reviewed on Aug 28, 2022