Avoid, even if you love Time Hollow and Phoenix Wright
Lux-Pain is a Graphic Adventure in the vein of Time Hollow, Phoenix Wright and Snatcher that will hopefully never be mentioned in the same sentence as those classics again. Graphic Adventures live and die on the quality of their story and their ability to tell it well via engaging characters and narrative. Despite having high production values featuring lots of voice over work, high quality manga style graphics and a ton of animated scenes, Lux-Pain has a terrible and confusing story and no gameplay to speak of, which makes it an extremely frustrating and disappointing affair.
Your character and the situation are introduced immediately in two sentences, with all the flair of an under-average fan-fiction. You learn that you are Atsuki and you have the power of The Shining... I mean Sigma, an ability that allows you to see evil presences invisible to the naked eye. Kind of like a Sixth Sense. Your character is a field agent in a supernatural organisation called FORT whose current objective is to wipe out a threat known as "Silent", a parasitic worm born of hatred (and apparently a mysterious person called The Origin) that causes people to commit crimes or kill themselves. It can only be detected and destroyed by Sigma, which is mighty convenient for you. You are not alone, you have a direct contact at the agency, as well as a girl who can detect the location of "Silent" in the area. There are also constant run-ins with another field agent who doesn't seem to like you very much. Your ultimate objective is to destroy the evil little worms, who then reveal to you the memory that created them, which act as clues to find out who infected them, and trace the infection back to find out who exactly this Origin person is and stop them. I think.
The first thing that strikes you is the poor quality of the translation, filled with inconsistencies, poor phrasing, strange shortening and bad poetry. The on-screen subtitles don't even match the wording of the voice-overs, sometimes saying completely different sentences. At first I thought there was a cool mind reading mechanic at work, bit it's not the case. Either the voice actors were given a totally different iteration of the script or they decided to ad-lib their lines because it's so poorly written and nonsensical.
Your first bit of gameplay involves looking at a static image and interacting with it with the stylus. On the top screen, you are already shown where the "Silent" are likely to be, and you have to rub at the same place on the bottom screen like a scratchcard until you find the yellow, pulsing little buggers and keep your stylus on them until they dissapear. Once all are found, you are given a score based on what you found and how long it took, the scene then continues and lucky you, you get to keep playing.
The first person your character happens upon starts talking to you, immediately and automatically Atsuki uses his power to scan him for "Silent". No greeting, no conversation or questions. The screen freezes and you use the same scratch card technique on him, this time with a time limit. When that is finished, with no real instruction you then match past clues to him haphazardly and hope for the best until the scene continues. After you're finished, the person wonders why you're staring them and walks off. End of scene. It's as if the game purposefully turns itself into an awkward farce while taking itself completely seriously.
The 'story' never gets any better than this. Nothing is explained, you move your character from scene to scene aimlessly clicking and watching brief, baffling events go by before being booted back to the map screen to do it some more. In the second chapter, Atsuki is assigned to pose as a student at a school to investigate the case, like in.. I don't know, too many movies, video games and television series to count, as an excuse to span multiple genres and push more lifeless characters at you.
No real time or effort was spent on localising this game beyond the earnest work of the voice actors. If the original work was this shallow and confusing, I can see why. Don't be tempted by this game's superficial similarity to engrossing titles like Another Code or the Ace Attourney series. Beneath the surface, like the victims in the game, it's just gross and empty.