Lucifer Within Us

It's an okay proof of concept of a potentially interesting concept had it been in better, unrushed hands. The miniscule playtime alone means you should not consider this when it's not on fairly frequent deep discount. Three very short cases that suffer from that Phoenix Wright problem of the solution being clear but the frustration of working out exactly what contradiction the game wants you to provide making up a lot of the time. And boy were all three cases painfully obvious, worst of all the last one that had precisely one possibility just from the physical evidence and the initial testimonies. The horrifically rushed story beats, recycled cast and incomplete audio add to this very shallow puzzle depth are all things I'd live with seeing in an alpha test, but not a final release.

Lucifer Within Us feels like a game where the developers clearly had bigger ambitions than their budget could carry. You end up with this odd mix of voiced and non‑voiced sections, and an ending that dumps a lot of exposition at once. All of it hinting at a larger world they didn’t quite get to finish. But within its 3 missions, it offers something genuinely interesting. You step into a cybernetic religious world, solving cases by cross-referencing timelines. Using objects from crime scenes and testimonies from suspects, you piece together murder cases in a unique and clever way. I bought this for €3, and at that price, it was definitely worth it for the art style and the original take on the detective genre. I recommend picking it up on sale, but be prepared, it leaves you with a "what if" feeling about what the game could have been, which is a bit sad.

TLDR: It's a detective game with a unique gameplay loop but it's incredibly short. It's a great gameplay loop. You investigate a crime scene for clues and interview suspects about what happened. You can compare their testimony timelines against each others and confront them about contradictions between them. Slowly you unveil what everyone really did as reveal the lies and half truths until you can cobble together what actually happened. It's fun gameplay.... There's just not a lot of it. There's only three missions and they have 2-3 suspects apiece. You can gather all of the physical crime scene evidence pretty quickly. It's engaging but it's so short that the ending feels like a shock. I finished the third mission and as the first cutscene of the game started dropping exposition, I thought "Oh sweet it's setting up the story and what's gonna make the next set of missions compelling"... Nope, the game just ends and I was left wondering why a 2 hour game needed this big ending cutscene when I've barely been exposed to the story/world

[i]More reviews like this one [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45764125/]here![/url][/i] Many years ago I reviewed a game called Moon Hunters, saying that the issue with it was that it was fundamentally a very interesting and playable proof-of-concept lacking any of the meat that a real game needs. I concluded that review as follows: "It feels like this game was rushed out, and while I can understand both the resource crunch and the desire not to work on one project forever as a small dev, there's a point at which you have be honest with what you're capable of before you start setting expectations, internal and external." This is the same dev, and they have not learned this lesson in the ensuing years. This game, again, feels like a polished playtest for an interesting deduction system with a game hastily assembled around it. As I felt with Moon Hunters, the system they invented was interesting and unique, but everything else felt so rushed and incomplete that it's not worth encountering just for what is basically a proposal for a cool gameplay idea. Because yeah, the system here is interesting, and one of the more unique I've seen. It involves comparing testimonies via a simultaneous timeline where you can line up stories and see where they contradict each other and the environment, and then press the suspects when you find those contradictions. I quite liked how it played, but there were three small 'cases' following 2 or 3 suspects, which was just too small for them to feel engaging. I would much rather have seen one cohesive story using this system to comb through 5 or 6 suspects. Comparing two people just feels like a tech demo. And each case was very obvious as a result. Plotwise... I have little patience for Christian apologia, something that *might* have colored my experience of this game. But  the story here was such a mess that I'm not sure it matters. Yeah, the Christian-coded Inquisition are heroes, but heroes of a piece so thematically chaotic that it's hard to derive anything meaningful from it. This was, interestingly, also a problem with Moon Hunters, which was about a weird, nonsensical religious conflict. This seems to be a bit of a pet thing with the dev, but what's weird about it is in neither case do the games actually say anything about religion or religious conflict. They just... exist around them. The plot in this game was honestly just flabbergasting. "Wouldn't it be crazy if God was actually Satan??? but also Satan was actually an AI??? and now everyone who uses a phone is POSSESSED????" Lol, what the ♥♥♥♥ are you on about. Trying to couple this kind of 'im 12 and this is deep' stuff with this insane choice to have one of the characters just be Alan Rickman as Snape just so we know who the mastermind is immediately is so weird, in a 'how stupid do you think your audience is' kind of way. Also the whole 'people only do bad things because Satan makes them' is as vapid and irritating a story beat as it always is, I wish someone would deconstruct that nonsense. It's kind of weird to see a developer not mature at all over 5 years. From an experiential perspective, this is just Moon Hunters 2: Electric Boogaloo. I'll conclude with another bit from my Moon Hunters review: "It's a shame so many of the bigger elements are a mess, because the core mechanic is very well done and a lot of the ideas here are so good. I would have rather they just went for broke on the experimental nature of it and positioned it as a proof-of-concept than hastily filled in the adventure-game elements in a way that promised so, so much more than it could deliver."

Its a decent game, but DEAR GOD do not buy it full price. The story is VERY short. Too short for the twist to hit properly. If we had a longer time in the world then maybe. As is, very glad I got it 80% off. It would function far better as a demo for something greater.

As much as I enjoyed *parts* of the game, I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone. The gameplay is somewhat interesting and the foundations of a great idea/game are all there. Unfortunately, there are so many weird bugs, audio/dialogue issues, animation issues, and just not enough good, fleshed out (or even complete) content to recommend it. If you're curious and it's on sale then sure, buy it. Otherwise, don't.

Thanks to other reviews giving me warning, I only purchased this on sale for $3. At that price, it's okay for what it is, but it's still extremely lacking for a game. The aesthetic is really nice, and the concept behind the mechanics is interesting, but it's lacking depth on virtually all levels. The only two cases beyond the tutorial are extremely simple, and fairly easy to figure out the culprit immediately based solely on revealing the first "psychological evidence." Due to the extremely short list of daemons to match them against, it's fairly obvious who the culprit will be without even unveiling all the evidence yet. Doing so is just necessary to be able to form a full accusation. There is very little in the way of worldbuilding, aside from the visual design, which is fairly well polished, everything about the game is rather shallow. As another reviewer commented, it's a great proof of concept for a game, but not really a full game by itself.

Disappointing. Felt like I played a Demo rather than a full game. I feel unsatisfactory even though I bought it on sale for like 2 bucks.

Definietly only buy this one on a sale. It is much too short for the high price, and some of the stuff, especially voice acting, seems unfinished. I wouldn't be surprised if a deadline came earlier than the devs expected. If it were longer, I'd be able to recommend it for sure, though

A cool spin on the detective game formula which allows you to track and cross-reference timelines of up to 3 characters' versions of events. Very short story and hilariously rushed ending. Not bad for $3 though.