Beautiful moments surrounded by rough edges.
Spoilers.
Love-de-Lic is a name I'm familiar with, but their games have never been anything I've ever actually touched. Their final game, L.O.L.: Lack of Love, is perhaps an ironic title in retrospect; the studio folded not long after putting this out, with most of the core members scattering themselves across the industry. This wasn't a bad one to end things on.
If Lack of Love is anything, it's unique. I played through it with the help of an English fan patch, but this is a story about nature, and one that's told almost entirely without words. The only thing you're going to be reading is the save prompt and mostly-unhelpful gameplay hints, neither of which are going to impact your understanding all that much. You could play through this in any language and get through it just fine, which helps immensely in selling the universality of a title like this.
The aim of the game, per the instruction manual, is to survive. You're given no greater goal than this. The game opens, makes you hatch from an egg, and then you're thrust into life completely on your own and left to figure things out for yourself. This is going to be the source of all of your enjoyment, and the source of all of your frustrations. Without the game ever telling you anything, it can make it nearly impossible to figure out what you're meant to do at any given time. Sometimes it'll be obvious (save a creature from being attacked by other creatures), and other times it'll be cryptic beyond any reasonable chance of you figuring it out on your own (like gathering blue glowflies from a stream at night, slowly walking them over to a creature, greeting it, sleeping in front of it, greeting it while you're asleep, and then giving it the glowflies). Each creature you help gives you a CosmoBall, which you then spend at crystals to evolve into your next stage of life.
Not helping the matter is the fact that the game can be incredibly specific about how it wants you to approach the environmental puzzles. One creature aptly named "HELP-ME" in Stage 4 gets attacked by bugs, and requires you to fight them off; even though I kept attacking and driving them away, the HELP-ME wouldn't stop getting swarmed. I thought I might have been doing something wrong, but I did the exact same thing about ten times in a row, and it eventually started working as intended just in time for me to open OBS so I could get video evidence of it happening. This is mostly a problem in the early stages, and it feels as though the creators learned a lot more about their own game system as they progressed through development. Still, this is a rough start. If you aren't already in love with the game by the time you get here, it'll start to feel difficult to justify moving forward.
The game gets immensely better near the back half, though. Lack of Love loves to create these natural interactions with all of these various creatures, and the ones you'll find in later stages are beyond memorable. Racing with the dragonflies, scaling the cliffs by being punted by tall birds, escaping a suddenly-horrific meat-jail after being captured by bugs, meeting other members of your species for the first time; all of these parts come together to create a beautiful little glimpse into this ecosystem, and it's one that masters the illusion of feeling truly alive. Betraying and killing an animal that you were previously friends with because you need food is never an easy thing to do, but it'll happen many, many times before you see the credits roll.
But there is a greater plot lurking beneath the pure-survival surface. Drones and robots wander the planet, trampling the other creatures beneath the grinding rubber of their treads. Terraforming devices get jammed into the ground, obliterating entire biomes and carving away every bit of life within after they've completed their countdown. The head robot in charge, Halumi, is in an active war with nature. I was amazed that they were listed as a protagonist in the manual, because they couldn't more obviously be an antagonist. Their actions hurt you and your animal friends. Life is precious in Lack of Love, no matter how small, but Halumi doesn't seem to care much about the preservation of the flora and fauna here.
After a long journey through the many habitats of this world, Halumi manages to capture you, purely by chance. You're tossed into an enclosure like a captured trophy, made to perform in little puzzle challenges to prove your worth. The sound of your feet hitting plastic and steel instead of grass and dirt is going to shock you. You push blocks around. Your final trial is to reject one of your companion animals in favor of a mechanical doll made to look like a human baby. Halumi, approving of your choice, shows you how Earth's over-consumption has lead to overcrowding and disease, and how the humans have approved the use of the L.O.L. program to send robots to the stars in search of new, habitable planets.
It's at this point near the end of the game that I start to get nervous. To succeed in Halumi's eyes and be rewarded with showers of confetti and a roof over my head, I have to give up everything I've learned until this point. My potential relationships are completely pared down to two other captive animals who have already been selected as successes in the L.O.L. program. Failure means getting tossed in a test tube and experimented on. I've gone from surviving off mushrooms and making new companions to being held in captivity and judged based on my ability to solve mazes. Who the fuck does this robot think they are, anyway? What gives humanity the right to come here and trample on this world after they've so thoroughly ruined the last one? And to do what, exactly? Spoil the place again, and repeat the process on another planet the next time that they're struck with an "overpopulation" problem?
But it doesn't come to pass. Despite Halumi's best efforts to terraform the planet, a massive storm destroys every piece of equipment and renders the planet incompatible with human life. Your character, stronger than ever, fights through the pounding rain and the flashes of lightning, rejecting L.O.L. and escaping deeper into the wilderness. Halumi — and by extension, humanity — have failed. If the L.O.L. project ever bears fruit, it won't be here. They'll remain trapped in their little cities, crowded and ill, desperate for a solution that may never come.
Halumi emerges from the wreckage, beams of light streaming down from the dark clouds above. L.O.L. is over. Whatever purpose Halumi once had is no more.
Halumi has failed.
No longer bound by the shackles of their mission, they wander away, integrating themselves with nature. Your character and their companion critter enter into a massive forest of leaves and roots. Bird-like creatures snatch up smaller quadrupeds for eating, and find themselves snapped in the jaws of massive dinosaurs. Bugs chirp and buzz amid the squeals and roars of the fauna beneath the pale blue sky. Halumi pets one of the creatures, making sure not to step on a bug at their feet.
Halumi is freed.
The sun still rises on another world.
Spoilers.
Love-de-Lic is a name I'm familiar with, but their games have never been anything I've ever actually touched. Their final game, L.O.L.: Lack of Love, is perhaps an ironic title in retrospect; the studio folded not long after putting this out, with most of the core members scattering themselves across the industry. This wasn't a bad one to end things on.
If Lack of Love is anything, it's unique. I played through it with the help of an English fan patch, but this is a story about nature, and one that's told almost entirely without words. The only thing you're going to be reading is the save prompt and mostly-unhelpful gameplay hints, neither of which are going to impact your understanding all that much. You could play through this in any language and get through it just fine, which helps immensely in selling the universality of a title like this.
The aim of the game, per the instruction manual, is to survive. You're given no greater goal than this. The game opens, makes you hatch from an egg, and then you're thrust into life completely on your own and left to figure things out for yourself. This is going to be the source of all of your enjoyment, and the source of all of your frustrations. Without the game ever telling you anything, it can make it nearly impossible to figure out what you're meant to do at any given time. Sometimes it'll be obvious (save a creature from being attacked by other creatures), and other times it'll be cryptic beyond any reasonable chance of you figuring it out on your own (like gathering blue glowflies from a stream at night, slowly walking them over to a creature, greeting it, sleeping in front of it, greeting it while you're asleep, and then giving it the glowflies). Each creature you help gives you a CosmoBall, which you then spend at crystals to evolve into your next stage of life.
Not helping the matter is the fact that the game can be incredibly specific about how it wants you to approach the environmental puzzles. One creature aptly named "HELP-ME" in Stage 4 gets attacked by bugs, and requires you to fight them off; even though I kept attacking and driving them away, the HELP-ME wouldn't stop getting swarmed. I thought I might have been doing something wrong, but I did the exact same thing about ten times in a row, and it eventually started working as intended just in time for me to open OBS so I could get video evidence of it happening. This is mostly a problem in the early stages, and it feels as though the creators learned a lot more about their own game system as they progressed through development. Still, this is a rough start. If you aren't already in love with the game by the time you get here, it'll start to feel difficult to justify moving forward.
The game gets immensely better near the back half, though. Lack of Love loves to create these natural interactions with all of these various creatures, and the ones you'll find in later stages are beyond memorable. Racing with the dragonflies, scaling the cliffs by being punted by tall birds, escaping a suddenly-horrific meat-jail after being captured by bugs, meeting other members of your species for the first time; all of these parts come together to create a beautiful little glimpse into this ecosystem, and it's one that masters the illusion of feeling truly alive. Betraying and killing an animal that you were previously friends with because you need food is never an easy thing to do, but it'll happen many, many times before you see the credits roll.
But there is a greater plot lurking beneath the pure-survival surface. Drones and robots wander the planet, trampling the other creatures beneath the grinding rubber of their treads. Terraforming devices get jammed into the ground, obliterating entire biomes and carving away every bit of life within after they've completed their countdown. The head robot in charge, Halumi, is in an active war with nature. I was amazed that they were listed as a protagonist in the manual, because they couldn't more obviously be an antagonist. Their actions hurt you and your animal friends. Life is precious in Lack of Love, no matter how small, but Halumi doesn't seem to care much about the preservation of the flora and fauna here.
After a long journey through the many habitats of this world, Halumi manages to capture you, purely by chance. You're tossed into an enclosure like a captured trophy, made to perform in little puzzle challenges to prove your worth. The sound of your feet hitting plastic and steel instead of grass and dirt is going to shock you. You push blocks around. Your final trial is to reject one of your companion animals in favor of a mechanical doll made to look like a human baby. Halumi, approving of your choice, shows you how Earth's over-consumption has lead to overcrowding and disease, and how the humans have approved the use of the L.O.L. program to send robots to the stars in search of new, habitable planets.
It's at this point near the end of the game that I start to get nervous. To succeed in Halumi's eyes and be rewarded with showers of confetti and a roof over my head, I have to give up everything I've learned until this point. My potential relationships are completely pared down to two other captive animals who have already been selected as successes in the L.O.L. program. Failure means getting tossed in a test tube and experimented on. I've gone from surviving off mushrooms and making new companions to being held in captivity and judged based on my ability to solve mazes. Who the fuck does this robot think they are, anyway? What gives humanity the right to come here and trample on this world after they've so thoroughly ruined the last one? And to do what, exactly? Spoil the place again, and repeat the process on another planet the next time that they're struck with an "overpopulation" problem?
But it doesn't come to pass. Despite Halumi's best efforts to terraform the planet, a massive storm destroys every piece of equipment and renders the planet incompatible with human life. Your character, stronger than ever, fights through the pounding rain and the flashes of lightning, rejecting L.O.L. and escaping deeper into the wilderness. Halumi — and by extension, humanity — have failed. If the L.O.L. project ever bears fruit, it won't be here. They'll remain trapped in their little cities, crowded and ill, desperate for a solution that may never come.
Halumi emerges from the wreckage, beams of light streaming down from the dark clouds above. L.O.L. is over. Whatever purpose Halumi once had is no more.
Halumi has failed.
No longer bound by the shackles of their mission, they wander away, integrating themselves with nature. Your character and their companion critter enter into a massive forest of leaves and roots. Bird-like creatures snatch up smaller quadrupeds for eating, and find themselves snapped in the jaws of massive dinosaurs. Bugs chirp and buzz amid the squeals and roars of the fauna beneath the pale blue sky. Halumi pets one of the creatures, making sure not to step on a bug at their feet.
Halumi is freed.
The sun still rises on another world.
CorpsSansOrganes
1 year ago