[Click here to start from the first progress log]

All right, I’ve officially obtained all four endings, unlocked all of the Steam achievements to be absolutely certain that I’m not missing out on anything, and even installed the “uncensor” mod to get a feel for what that adds. I can now say for certain that the truth of what happened between Lockhart and his dead best friend doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, though the back story explaining why the two might have come into conflict is the driving force behind two of the four endings. Speaking of which, this game’s endings remind me a lot of the way Cyanide’s underappreciated Game of Thrones RPG handled its endings, which is to say that they run the gamut from soul-crushingly bleak to bittersweet. There are no traditional “good guy rides into the sunset” resolutions here because there are no good guys, and the most you can hope for is a tiny sliver of redemption.

The pluses and minuses of using a controller

For my second playthrough, I decided to use a controller, and this immediately backfired as I clicked through some dialogue too fast and ended up crashing the game. In fairness, this isn’t the fault of the controller, but some weirdness that can arise when skipping too fast through dialogue. This happens with the mouse, too, as I later managed to reset some dialogue between two cutscenes by skipping through them, causing the wrong dialogue to play during an unskippable ending cutscene.

Another weird thing is that the “confirm” button is right trigger instead of one of the face buttons. That fits tonally, but definitely ran afoul of my muscle memory.

Once I got used to using the right trigger and stopped trying to skip through things too quickly, though, everything fell into place. Using a controller causes a cursor to appear, and you move it around the match-3 board to switch pieces around. This is a little slower than using the mouse, but it works. That said, I noticed two strange things about using a controller. First, having to move piece-by-piece caused me to focus less on the bigger picture, which caused the gameplay to be quite a bit more challenging on a gamepad. That seems like a psychology study waiting to happen. The second strange thing is that match-3 fights sometimes begin with matches already having been made, and this happened far more when using a controller.

The thing that eventually caused me to start using the mouse again is the lack of dead zone for the sticks. If either of them is remotely off-center, the cursor will go absolutely crazy and become unmanageable. I have to believe that this has been addressed for the console releases, but all things considered, I prefer the mouse.

Let’s talk about the uncensor patch

So-called “uncensor” patches aren’t something I’m hugely familiar with outside of the knowledge that they usually apply to the glut of anime-styled visual novels on Steam and unlock content that the store would otherwise disallow the distribution of. I do remember reading that Steam’s started cracking down on these by not allowing links to be posted to them on their game forums, but that’s how I found out about this game’s uncensor patch in the first place. Shrug. Anyway, you’ll probably recognize where a lot of the uncensored parts are by playing the game without the patch, as there are sex scenes where naughty thrusting bits are obscured by various objects. That doesn’t stop the default experience from including a fair amount of toplessness, but things definitely take a bit of a pornographic turn with the patch applied.

Still, that’s not all that the patch does. Certain scenes are lengthened, and while these longer scenes tend to include more full male and female nudity, there are also relatively tasteful parts such as in the picture above. Additionally, there are more subtle changes such as strippers occasionally not wearing underwear. The main menu also has a “NSFW” link that opens up a browser to a page for sex games.

Needless to say, the console versions aren’t going to have access to any of this stuff. Most of it is as gratuitous as it is pointless, but I do like the small bit of relatively tasteful added content in the scene pictured above. Her story and ending (ending 2, for the curious) is the one I connected with the most and that had the most fulfilling character arc for Lockhart, and while certain parts of this story seemed to be ripped straight out of Sin City, I actually felt that it worked slightly better in this case.

[Click here to go to Metropolis: Lux Obscura log #1]

The post Metropolis – Lux Obscura: Progress Log #2 [END] appeared first on Killa Penguin.