Lucifer Within Us is a puzzle game that delivers a twist on the Phoenix Wright style of investigative mystery inside a strange cyber-religious setting where you play an inquisitor tasked of finding demons possessing. The game has some neat aesthetics and good writing, but it overall left me a bit perplexed, as much on the ultimate finer points of the story, the difficulty and overall length of the game and the core mechanics that bring everything together. I still had a good time with it and blasted through the whole thing in one sitting, so I’m overall appreciative of what they did with it.
The core of the game goes as thus; You need to figure out who killed the victim in each of the three cases by listening to everyone’s testimonies and presenting evidence (either objects you will find around on the map) or by presenting pieces of testimony from other people. When you manage to find a contradiction, you get to see a bit of the person’s psyche, which can serve as a clue later. You can press for evidence and get more information if you want, and ultimately you can accuse someone of being guilty by presenting the ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘why’. Where Phoenix Wright deals with the testimony part by having you read a few lines of text and ponder over them, Lucifer Within Us goes with a timeline system where you can watch in real-time the flow of events and move the playback position to any spot.
This feels a bit clunky and even useless in practice for many reasons; First, some chunks of the timeline are just useless and don’t give you any information (the game even tells you that you can skip them if you want), secondly, they don’t bring anything more to help you solve the mystery than what the text says. At no point in the game have I ‘deduced’ something more because of what I’ve seen rather than what the character said was going on in that time frame. I feel like a single picture would have been enough to convey the same information. I spent quite a large portion of my time with the game just clicking on the segments of the timeline, reading the text and moving on. The game also highlights in gold the parts of the timeline that are ‘objectively true’ which can help you solve the mystery, but on more than one occasion I was waiting for the whole timeline to get gold before accusing someone, because I didn’t know when I would have everything properly solved, but that’s not necessary.
There are no penalties for failing in Lucifer Within Us, something I certainly appreciate. While it’s true that it’s kinda silly that to exorcism someone you need to say the name of the demon that haunts them, that there are only 4 choices and you can try them all without any consequence, you wouldn’t get anything more for kicking you back to a previous checkpoint or something like that - like Phoenix Wright does - maybe in this case I would’ve given -something- for not making mistakes, like unlocking some neat demon concept art - they look really good! They got that Shin Megami Tensei feeling - or other pieces of media if you manage to clear the cases without making that many mistakes.
I ultimately felt a bit disappointed by how the story played out. The atmosphere in everything up to the final moments of the game was really good, steeped in religious cyber-conspiracies, but then it took a strange turn into something I didn’t enjoy as much. Without being too specific, having a story end with “…and now the real story begins!” is a bit confusing, especially that the whole of Lucifer Within Us lasts around the same time as one case of Phoenix Wright. It’s not that big of a deal, but I still felt like I hit the end way too fast, things just happened too quickly!
Overall I had a good time with Lucifer Within Us, on the strength of its writing and interesting twist on familiar gameplay mechanics, so I can certainly recommend it if you know what you’re getting into. I would certainly play additional cases if they materialized from the aether at some point, but I’m also content with the story I’ve played through. I just wish I got to know these characters and world better!
