External Links

Steam
for Windows, Mac, and Linux
App Store
for iPhone, iPad, and iPod
Google Play Store
for Android

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page

Luminous Underground

by Phoebe Barton

Science Fiction
2020

Web Site

(based on 1 rating)
1 review

About the Story

Blast spirits out of a haunted subway system! Can your team defeat rival exterminators, shoddy gear, and City Hall?

You've been a daemon dissipator for years, carrying a rainbow blaster and learning the ins and outs of magic to zap electromagnetic monsters into static. After following the jobs from one end of Septenland to the other, you've settled down here in Barrington: an old city. A weird city. A city boiling with spirits, specters, and daemons. It's the perfect place to start a company of your own.

The Luminous Underground is a 660,000-word interactive secondary-world science fantasy novel by Phoebe Barton, where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Your team is just you and McCowan, your friend and business partner, but it's hard for two people to run an operation like this. When you applied for a contract with the Barrington Transit Commission, you didn't expect anything but a flat rejection. But you got it! And now you've got to find more teammates, sharpen your skills, and put a dent in the spirit population while staying well clear of the electrified rail.

But you'll find that Barrington's underground is much more than its tunnels. There's a forest down here, teeming with crystalline trees that glitter under your flashlight. There's a portal to the Vitalscape, a super-luminous alternative realm of being. You can enter it through a mural, but you'll need a crystal tuning fork to get back. There are giants, robots, daemons, and even a giant robot daemon.

Of course, corruption and mismanagement festers down here. Is this all part of your competitors’ attempts to secure the subway contract for their own? Is City Hall's stingy maintenance budget to blame? How much can you get paid not to fix this problem?

Are you ready to patrol your patch of subway, or will you stand by and let it crumble?
-Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, aromantic, or asexual.
-Descend into a magic-drenched subway and face down spirits beneath the streets!
-Help time travelers integrate into the incredible world of today.
-Dig up megacorporate corruption while you dust off vacuum tubes.
-Investigate mysterious disappearances down in the underground.
-Cooperate with other outfits in town, or act on your own
-Lead the mayor to safety through a gauntlet of terrors!
-Save the lives of a missing crew under an impossible sky.
-Calm down a giant woman who's got you in the palm of her hand.

Strange things are crawling out of the subway. Someone better call you.


Game Details

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Member Reviews

Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 1
Write a review


4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A very long Choicescript game about shooting ghosts in an alternate timeline, January 9, 2021
by MathBrush
Related reviews: more than 10 hours

This is a very long game. At 600,000 words, it's only half as long as Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale, but has much less branching, I believe, as my total playtime was over 10 hours, a first for a Choicescript game for me.

Just the first two chapters alone felt longer than most Choicescript games.

You play as the leader of a two-person team of ghostbusters. It's an alternate world where the year is about 1100, there are different gods, different timeline, etc.

There's a lot to admire in this game. The last few chapters are exciting, and some people on reddit and the CoG forums seem very happy with it. Overall, it's a polished experience.

But I feel like it suffers from several structural issues.

One of the biggest for me personally is that the first 2/3 is relentlessly negative. The game starts with you failing something, and you fail over an over again. Frequently the choices are between 3 ways you messed up. Your character is pretty negative too, with a different choice being 3 ways to express you are hopeless, or 3 ways to express that you think other people are jerks. This game also has a lot more choices where you have to pick which of your stats go down, more than any other Choicescript game I've seen. Some people like this; someone said on reddit that they're glad it's not just another Chosen One story like most others.

I'm naturally optimistic, so I found the negativity grating. The last 1/3 is definitely more cheerful.

Another issue is repetitiveness. The first 6 or 8 chapters have the exact same pattern repeated a dozen times:

You're called into the subways to deal with a threat. But, this time, it's going to be just ordinary. Ah, but you get a sinking feeling that something's wrong. You experience a minor ghostly threat and finish it off. Then you encounter something magic-related that no human has ever encountered. Then you go home.

Some relationship choices are forced. You'll always feel sorry for Alice, you'll always decide Junker is a jerk (for most of the game, at least).

I think Choicescript games thrive when the author uses external forces on the player instead of internal. That's why school, war, and high society games work out so well: if your principal says you have to do something, you have to do it. If your rich uncle says you have to do something, you have to do it. If your enemy blows up the bridge, you have to find another way around.

But this game will frequently just decide for you what your player will do in situations where it would be natural to let you choose for yourself.

Overall, I think this game will appeal most to people who love to sink into an alternate world. Its length is enormous and there are definitely different paths I'd do in a replay. I was negative about a few things, but I definitely feel like this game is worth its cost. But I definitely think that the author should write another. Nothing helps as much as experience, and the later chapters with more action tell me that they learned as they went, and the length of the game shows they can make content.

Edit: Some other positives that came to mind are the large cast of characters. And it's true there is a crewmate that takes over the show, but I kind of liked there plotline, which was bizarre and seems like a very specific but fun fantasy. I felt like I had real choices in the final chapter, and sweated over a few in a good way. Finally, the blend of fantasy and sci-fi was done masterfully.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 




This is version 2 of this page, edited by Lance Campbell on 21 January 2021 at 8:27pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page