Quick Thoughts On: Luxuria Superbia
Fair warning, this review might get weird. But that's sort of hard to do when you're talking about a game that is a giant metaphor for sex. Luxuria Superbia is a game about making love, thinly disguised behind the notion of making flowers "bloom", placing you in the "role" of a hypothetical penis flying through an infinite vagina. It's both incredibly strange yet oddly alluring, like something you know you shouldn't enjoy but can't quite pull yourself away from it. All the same, it fails entirely at being anything more than a very unusual art project; hyper sexualized (though not at all pornographic) and occasionally even beautiful, but shallow and tedious as an actual game. Though I'm hesitant to say you actually "play" Luxuria, interaction comes in the form of you flowing through colorful tunnels, with burst to life as you touch petals that come along the path, with the goal being to keep as much color showing without entirely filling up every side and "finishing" the flower too soon (which results in a disappointed message on-screen asking you "what went wrong"). The longer you can stay in a flower the more points you get (which are gained faster when more color is on-screen), and the happier the "flower" will be at the end. That's really all there is to the "game", which straddles the line between interactive entertainment, and something you'd find on a perverted corner of the internet. Every moment is tinged with a highly suggestive undertone, though I wouldn't call it subtle, for as soon as you begin to get deeper into a flower much of any pretense is abandoned as the developer makes sure you know exactly what they are symbolizing.
Playing Luxuria Superbia made me feel dirty, like I was a kid stumbling upon his father's secret magazines and proceeding to throw away my innocence. It's awkward and maybe a little uncomfortable to sit through, but at the very least I can't knock it for being anything but unique and artistic. Once you get past the erotic outer layers though, you are still left with an incredibly boring and ultimately pointless experience that grows tiresome before you bring your first flower to completion. I couldn't say quite how I feel about the analogies the game presents, but my opinion of the portion that makes it a game at all is very clear, that being one which I couldn't wait to abandon and really have no explanation for why I started in the first place.
Let's just say Luxuria Superia is weird, and you would probably be best to leave it by the wayside in favor of more traditional forms of pleasure.
"Quick Thoughts" is a subset of my normal reviews for smaller games which might not fit into a full review but I still have something to say about.