The Luminous Underground
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it. You’re a daemon dissapator, after all - venturing into sunless places infested with noxious electromagnetic entities is what you do for a living. When you won the contract with the Barrington Transit Commission to spend your nights patrolling the subway tunnels, you were just thrilled to have a steady gig. But there’s something rotten in Barrington, something that stinks worse than the corruption you’ve come to expect from City Hall. You had no idea just how dangerous your new job was going to be.
Before I plunged into Phoebe Barton’s maximum opus The Luminous Underground, I read the information available from the stats page about the skills the PC can develop and the ways they can influence the world, and I knew almost immediately that I was in good hands. Barton writes beautifully, with wit and acuity and a rare openness to the possibilities of language. At its best, her prose is lucid and delightful, even - yes - luminous. Once the story gets rolling, there are some boggy bits, but that feels strangely appropriate to the PC’s experience, wading as they are against the currents of jargon and tunnel grime and red tape.
Most of the way through the game, I was prepared to write an almost unequivocally positive review, because there’s a lot that’s great about this game. If you love magically mundane urban fantasy workplace stories, the kind where you spend as much time pushing a pencil as waving a wand, The Luminous Underground is probably your cup of tea, a sort of blue-collar answer to the likes of Professor of Magical Studies, Social Services of the Doomed, and Choice of the Deathless. This game should also appeal to fans of Kyle Marquis; Barton and Marquis have a similar dry wit, but more importantly, the same strain of audacious brilliance: the ability to take a weird concept, make it weirder, and still make it work. Unfortunately, Barton doesn’t have the same degree of control; where Marquis keeps the weirdness at a masterful simmer almost without fail, Barton eventually lets it boil over.
Before I get to my criticism, I’d like to discuss the most common objection I’ve seen raised to this game, which is that the author’s leftist politics get in the way of a good story. While Barton makes no attempt to conceal her worldview, this is a game about subway ghostbusters, not a doctrinaire screed. There are three sets of nonbinary pronouns in use in the world of the game, but it’s no quirkier than anything else about the setting unless you’re determined to be offended by it. There’s a major character who is genderfluid, and one semi-major and a few minor characters who use neopronouns, but I never found it confusing (although I can see how it might be if you don’t know “gender 101”). The one thing I found objectionable was a scene involving a mayoral debate. We’re told one of the candidates is a fascist, although Barton never, at least on the route I played, shows him saying or doing anything inherently unconscionable. At one point, a member of the crowd is obviously about to hurl a brick at him, and the PC, worried at the potential for a riot, can attempt to talk him out of it. I had my PC do so by arguing that there are more effective ways to make a difference. I was thinking in terms of persuasion backed by moral authority (and not giving the bad guy the perfect opportunity to play the martyr), but was horrified to find my character advocating ambushing the politician instead of assaulting him in front of a crowd. Fortunately, it was an isolated episode that didn’t seem connected to the rest of the story in any way, but it bothered me that Barton wouldn’t allow me to play as a character who believes initiating violence is always and inherently wrong.
Where the game mostly lost me was in the final chapter, which took me several hours to play through and involved almost nonstop action. Much of it isn’t even connected specifically to the storyline; it’s just a gantlet of arcane battles on the way to the final boss. Maybe it’s all consistent with Barton’s grand cosmology, but it all feels very thrown-together: hovering buildings? some kind of disco inferno thing? punching a hole in reality with a giant fist? Sure, why not? Most episodes are perfectly good, in themselves, but they just keep coming. And coming. And coming. It’s climactic tension that never lets up. There’s a reason the classic plot structure involves things rising to a relatively brief climax. Cranking things up to eleven is awesome, but peaks aren’t meant to be sustained, and eleven gets to be exhausting after a while. The result is a final chapter that feels bloated and self-indulgent. Ironically, Barton wouldn’t even have had to kill her darlings to make a better game, just shuffle them around a bit - using different episodes on different story routes would have greatly improved pacing and focus, while adding considerable replay value.
In the end, although I can’t praise The Luminous Underground as highly as I had hoped, I really can’t pan it, either. Barton’s work sparkles with so much playful creativity even in its most cynical moments, it’s hard not to want to know where she’s going to take her characters next. Watch your step, find a seat, maybe don’t try to read the last chapter in a single sitting, and enjoy the ride.