A very popular game genre as of late has been the visual novel genre. Which mostly consists of text stories brought to life with moving characters and environments. So when Project Lux was announced for the PSVR, I was interested to see how a visual novel game would be inside of VR. So, is Project Lux any good?
Project Lux is a PSVR visual novel that has you playing as a government cyborg that is visiting a girl named Lux to solve a trial. The story gets a lot more complicated than that, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.
The majority of Project Lux is reading translated text at the bottom of your view. It pretty much plays like if you were watching a VR movie, but with the occasional interaction by looking at objects. The text is clear and easy to read, but I ran into an issue where the text wouldn’t appear sometimes.
This game is in an Anime style, as most visual novels are. The character models are well designed, but some of the environments can look slightly pixelated.
There are 5 chapters in the game, which are around 20 minutes each. The entire game took me about an hour and a half to complete. But from the menu you can replay any chapter and start from one of many different points in that chapter.
There isn’t too much to talk about without getting into spoilers with this game. So what do I think about it? Well, I really didn’t enjoy playing it. The most important thing of a visual novel is it’s story, without a good story the game isn’t worth playing. And sadly I just didn’t enjoy the story. It’s filled with a lot of discussions that contribute nothing to the story, and nothing major really happens in the first four chapters. You’re told a lot about the world and problems in it, but you never see it for yourself, because the entire game takes place inside Lux’s house. It just felt like they did a lot of telling, but no showing, and because of that I didn’t really care about what happened to the characters. And I found it really hard to believe that they cared about each other at all towards the end. The story might work for others, but it just wasn’t done right in my opinion.
So overall, Project Lux is a mediocre game. The story really ruined it for me, and there wasn’t anything else to keep me interested. Everything else is good, but none of it could save the story. I just can’t recommend this game unless you’re a really big fan of this genre, or just want to see an anime girl in VR.
