The vast majority of (mainstream) RPGs are fairly formulaic in story and gameplay. While LISA doesn’t exactly innovate on the gameplay front, oh wow, does it innovate on the story front.
LISA: The Painful, is the second of three games (not counting the hundreds of fangames it spawned), the second being LISA: The Joyful, and the first being LISA: The First. Painful is typically seen as the quintessential experience the series has to offer, though. The game follows the life of a depressed, drug-addicted man named Brad as he lives out the rest of his days in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Olathe. An event called “The Flash” killed off all women somehow, leaving the men to a world of insanity and unbridled cruelty.
One day, while out on a morning walk, Brad stumbles upon a newborn baby out in the wastes. Brad is initially curious as to how a baby could have been born in a world without women, but then decides to take it upon himself to safeguard the child until it can fend for itself. He brings it to his ramshackle encampment where he lives with a few of his friends. They ask if he knows what gender it is, and, upon inspection, the child is identified as female. Brad then vows that he will protect her from the brutality of the world outside.
Brad spends years teaching the child (who he had named “Buddy”) about the evils of the world that she was born into and how to survive them. In the name of her own good, Brad kept her hidden away in a secret basement at his encampment. One day, word of Buddy’s existence got out.
Brad’s encampment is raided and Buddy is gone. The story truly begins as Brad sets out on a journey to rescue Buddy.
The story is exceptionally dark. Any vile thing you can imagine is probably something that happens in this game. Honestly though? It works. The people in this world are so terrible through and through that the terrible things they do come off as caricatures of themselves and end up being comical. The game can really be summed up by saying “terrible things happening to terrible people” (except Rando, he did nothing wrong).
This game also boasts a “choices matter” style of gameplay except unlike most games, your choices actually do matter. You can play Brad as a selfless hero type, or you can make him out to be a self-centered bastard who will kill anyone and everything in his path. Some people, though, are too far gone for any real change to matter…
The art of LISA is something. It certainly exists. Entirely pixel art, the game goes for a crude unappealing style meant to cause revulsion. It looks bleak and makes you feel bad. While extremely simplistic and sharp, it does its job well in putting you in the frankly, gross world of Olathe. In battles, the enemies look generally like they do in the overworld with their sprites scaled up, and they’re plastered onto an animated background like one of the ones from Earthbound.
Its gameplay, as mentioned, isn’t much of anything in the scheme of RPGs. It’s your standard turn-based combat with skills and “MP” along with normal attacks. It does shake things up a bit with certain characters being combo based, meaning that those characters require a certain button combination to be input before their attack can be executed.
The game has exceptional music for how it was made (just in general too, honestly). The creator of the music had zero experience making music and proceeded to make some of the craziest music ever conceived. I’d describe it as grimy, hard, oppressive, wacky, or disturbing if I had to pick any adjectives. For example, the track “Exploding Hearts”, starts off with a slow blues-esque intro that launches into hard breakcore with insane synthesizers beeping frantically. Despite being weird as all hell, these tracks manage to fit perfectly into the scene they’re made for. In the sequel to Painful, the tracks get even more bizarre and insane (“Mouth Wide Open” among others). I genuinely don’t think the game would hit nearly as hard as it does if it didn’t have this absolutely batshit insane soundtrack punching home its message.
The way the story forces you to grapple with the most raw moral dilemmas creates a game experience like no other. It does all of this while feeling still fantastical and unreal with characters who have human traits and relatable struggles. They’re haunted by their pasts, they struggle with addiction, loneliness, fear, anger… It’s a masterpiece of human emotion.
LISA: The Painful is a game that I would wholeheartedly recommend, it genuinely gave me a renewed perspective on the people around me. Everyone has problems, everyone thinks differently, everyone wants a little piece of hope. Solid 10 of a game, go grab it on Steam if you have it. LISA: The Painful: Definitive Edition