Notice
I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year. I’m also making an exception for this one, because it’s insane and kind of funny and I want to.
来人 LIGHTWORKERS is a story about family. You don’t turn your back on family.
Lightworkers is a visual novel about a man in 1920s Japan meeting his family, curing his depression, and becoming a cult leader. It was released two years ago as a free download on Steam, and was delisted from Steam just a few days back. The announcement about the delisting was very vague and abrupt, and, not sure how Steam handles delisting for things you don’t pay for, I decided I had to push it to the top of the short list and knock it out to see what the world was about to be missing.
You play as a man named Hiroshi, homeless and dying of leukemia on the streets of Tokyo in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake. Realizing he doesn’t have long left, he grimly visits his aunt, who runs an inn in the city, and asks her to take care of his giant pet wolf. Then he goes to an old castle and prepares to commit suicide, when suddenly a sharp dressed man steps out of the shadows and stops him. He introduces himself as Kiyoshi, your guardian angel, and tells you that you have a secret purpose to discover, and also that you can trivially win the lottery and cure your own leukemia if you just perform arbitrary code execution on reality. Believing him, you return to your aunt, who takes you in, and agree to work for her friends at the local newspaper.
At the paper, you quickly discover that the whole thing is a front for your cousin’s ghost hunting club, with the reporters giving them tips on ghost sightings. Having been warned by Kiyoshi that you have to listen to everything your cousin tells you, you tag along, and end up learning that you have psychokinetic powers and also are a starseed and that your cousin and her friend are soul sisters and are trying to save their soul mother who is trapped as a ghost somewhere. *takes a deep breath* And they only have a little bit of time left because ghosts eventually dissipate and their souls die if they’re around too long and also all the soul sisters have made a suicide pact in the spirit world if they don’t save their mother in time. It’s a lot, but Hiroshi takes it in stride. But buckle up, because the story gets wilder.
After successfully curing a few ghosts of their ghostiness and freeing their immortal souls to be reincarnated again, you finally start to piece together the underlying plot – the girl’s soul mother is currently trapped as the ghost of a Warring States Period kunoichi, who was part of a crew of female ninjas that got caught and murdered over a border dispute, along with their pet wolves. For reasons that are tediously explained by your guardian angel later, you have to save all the other kunoichi before finally tracking down the one who is also the soul mother, and also happens to be Hiroshi’s soul mate. Also also, everyone who shows up in the story is the reincarnation of someone in the parallel Warring States story, including the girl’s former lord and the female concubine who betrayed them, who are the only ones who have gender swapped and are married in the current time.
After you finally find and save your soul mate Shiyun, the story starts to wrap up, before jumping ahead into an even more absurd epilogue. There’s even more going on here, but the main thing to explain is that it takes a pretty hard turn into suspicious territory. Your little group of ghost hunters is now a fully staffed ‘organization’ that takes in people, gives them uniforms, and teaches them psychic techniques for fighting ghosts and saving souls. Kiyoshi returns to give everyone some good news: Hiroshi and his best friend are soon going to die in World War II, but they’re doing it on purpose to bro out and reincarnate as even cooler dudes to lead this cul- I mean ghostbuster association. Your group has infinite money because you gave your winning lottery ticket to your homeless friend who is now extremely rich, and everything that happens is both pre-ordained and very justified, because angels tell you so.
Beyond the story itself, the game is relatively competent, but not particularly gripping. There is a bit of adventure game style inventory collection and even item combining, but it’s extremely limited and pointless, and the vast majority of the game time is spent clicking through dozens of lines of dialogue or sitting through auto-playing cutscenes with even more dialogue. Those cutscenes have some of the most entertaining stuff in the game, as the paper doll models do somersault attacks on ghosts or ride on horses while carrying wolves or swim alongside hammerhead sharks or run around with suitcases full of cash or pick up giant boulders for some reason. Unfortunately, when you gain control, there’s little to actually see or do besides clicking your way to the next cutscene, and half the time there’s no indication of which branches of the path to take to get there. Thankfully there is a ‘hint’ indicator toggle that just puts a big fucking circle around everything you need to click on to proceed, but the handful of times you get a bit of freedom are more frustrating than its worth. Most of the screens you walk through are pretty short and basically filler, but there’s not really any reason for there to be filler in it either.
The writing is also pretty repetitive, and with the kunoichi sisters stories in particular, you basically have to sit through some barely distinct scenes three times over. A lot of events get handwaved and totally abandoned, like your character’s leukemia just vanishing and never being mentioned again. The game also has a particular feature of bad writing that has started to crystalize for me, which I would call ‘justification aside,’ but that’s something for me to think on a bit more. I will say that, despite seeming to come from a native Japanese speaker, the English is relatively solid, and aside from a few awkward lines and word choices, doesn’t carry obvious hallmarks of unpracticed or machine assisted translation.
The graphics have a pretty distinct style, with what are clearly photographic references just pasted right onto paper doll bodies and animated crudely, and even some of the effects are cute. However, there’s very little going on in the audio department, with sparse sound effects and long loops of quiet music leaving the whole thing feeling very muted and unfinished. At times it felt like I was watching scenes from a modern MDickie game with the sound off. It’s also not like fleshing it out a bit more would take that much effort, since what’s used is already barely-appropriate license free picks.
LIGHTWORKERS [the kanji is apparently just pronounced something like rai-to so I don’t feel bad dropping it] is not really a huge loss, but it does seem a bit unoffensive to warrant being purged. I really don’t think the story or flourishes are entertaining or interesting enough to be worth recommending as a playthrough, but it always feels a little melancholic when someone decides their work isn’t worth keeping around even as a curiosity. Hopefully this has nothing to do with them actually being a member of a crazy Japanese starseed cult, though based on them scrubbing their entire social media presence while I was in the middle of playing the game I get the sense that we may never see more of this story or from this developer… and yet… we may.
Afterward
Though the game itself has been taken off Steam, the developer is still very active, making weekly sound frequency healing videos and updating their blog, which mostly consists of incomprehensible babble and trippy AI generated pictures of spaceships and aliens. You can download the 2D paper dolls of Hana an alien, and her pet wolf/kirin, all as public domain assets you can use in your own Unity project. All of which makes it even weirder to me that they decided to delist LIGHTWORKERS, since they’re obviously not going away, and the pivot doesn’t even clash much with what the game is like.
You cannot download 来人 LIGHTWORKERS anywhere that I could find anymore.