Lust Campus is probably one of the best adult games you can ever find, yet it's not a really interesting game.
Even the title itself should already tell you as much. It's about campus life and a whole lot of lusty things going on. We follow Alice, an architecture student towards her College University. And yes, that is the name of the institution. Right from the start the player is confronted with the hollow nature of pornographic entertainment. There is no real sense of location. The university is not given its proper name because it doesn't have to be a university. It exists, behind the glamor and nice designs, as a porn set. Thus enters Alice, our perennial undergrad.
It's the same reason why you have similar titles like College Daze, College Craze (originally College Daze but was changed to avoid being mistaked for the other game), Annie's School Days, University of Problems, Lust Academy, etc. Characters like Alice are forever prohibited to graduate. They must submit to a libidinal loop, repeating each and every day of their college class where the source of youth and freedom—the constant supply of sexual awakenings and experiments—is boundlessly extracted and repackaged.
Perhaps it's because we all remember something from those college days. Perhaps it's not even something that has happened to us but something we're sure has been going on somewhere in the dorms or at parties. At the core of it Lust Campus is not really an adult game. It is anti-adulthood. It is against the notions of growth and responsibility. Because it keeps bringing us back to that first day of school where everything's new again. New people, young and attractive, frequent the lot where we belong. Where possibilities are exhilarating and scary.
This critique goes both ways. On the one hand the campus speaks to our desire, but it's stagnant and overused. The point, I think, is we need to find the balance, to avoid either a stubborn obsession not to grow up or a foolhardy insistence to grow too fast and regret not having lived at all. Game creators in the future should take note of story writing. We should continue using the campus but making it more real and creative, while simultaneously refraining from using it to make space for the experimentation of more difficult ideas. The subversive act, however, is to reveal the school as an ideological institution it is. Just like how Alice finds (or doesn't find) it thrilling to sneak into the archives where she's not supposed to be. There's a huge potential there to explore and deconstruct the prohibitive and punitive mechanisms of the school that haunt every move of our desire.
