One of the things essential to a healthy relationship with games, both as a player and creator, is the occasional trips to the shop. Branch out, check the shelves, and when you pick up your usual, there’s a face staring at you that you’ve seen before, but not like this – not with such a sly smile. That’s how Livber: Smoke and Mirrors came into mind.
This is the debut commercial title from Turkish developers InEv Games, a psychological horror VN that’s been making the rounds through gaming circles with comparisons to titles like Disco Elysium — a noble partner. You play as Elbek, a young man living in Gaia who, five years ago, condemned his lover Lilith to be killed after witnessing her practicing black magic. All those years later, and with a letter inviting him to their former home, you retrace the steps that lead not just to their love, but also to Elbek’s beginnings.
Despite the initial comparison to Disco Elysium, you’d be hard-pressed to find much more beyond its presentation. As a VN, Livber stays in that static area, showcasing still, but nonetheless compelling, imagery, with the narrator a character in and of itself. Quite often, they and Elbek will find themselves casting diatribes between each other, in what becomes the center piece of the story.
In reality, Livber bears more resemblance to legitimate cinema. Films that came to mind in the initial stretches of the game were titles like Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, and I could conceivably draw a path to the two. What inspirations Livber wears on its sleeves tend to dissipate over time, forming into something else that’s a lot more absorbing, especially in those face-offs between Elbek and his past.
Of course, that isn’t to downplay Elbek and Lilith’s history either. Early on, it’s quite clear that animosity is the name of the game, surprisingly for both parties. With Elbek, this antipathy comes across as quite immature, even when things become more fleshed out and developed, while Lilith? Lilith seems to play the host, an unjust, albeit obviously unhinged, curator.
That established conflict pays off in hefty dividends quite early on, but as you get a grasp of the world of Livber – with InEv being so kind as to provide on-the-spot glossary definitions for Gaia’s history – that conflict fades into something much more nebulous. Soon enough, it turns into an entire extension of testing Elbek to his limits, with callbacks, consternations, and commitments, most of which come from the narrator.
It’s a valid path to take, however, the writing doesn’t do much of a stellar job at convincing you of the stakes, in what is Livber’s weakest aspect narratively. There are bigger schemes at play here, but in terms of portraying what is happening, the lexicon used to describe it is quite restrictive. You’ll see a lot of repeated adjectives, for repeated objects of permanence – lidless eyes, constant mentions of black sludge, cooling air, so on and so forth.
This can be an issue, considering how Livber is exceptionally proud of its density. Claiming to have 60,000 words written for the title, InEv quickly finds struggles in emphasizing a lot of it with that unique flavor. That variety in path branching, or different contexts, can’t or won’t amount to much if it’s going to be emblazoned with the same descriptives.
There’s an exercise at first where the sound design is trying to run in tandem with the writing, which would’ve excused both at any point should one dip in quality. You hear it in the first couple of scenes, these howling winds, cutlery scraping across crude crockery, the loop brilliantly maddening. It’s not long before the game forgets this however, and sooner rather than later, you’re sitting in silence, with an overbearing soundtrack to boot.
In its purest essence, Livber has all the pieces to succeed, each and every single one of them showing their brilliance at different instances, but rarely will they all intertwine. Lilith’s sheer anger is portrayed with such a brooding quiet at first, when she slowly and succinctly explains her past, and the way she dances into Elbek’s mind. It’s quite mesmerizing, as much as it is antagonizing.
That quickly stops, as suddenly, all that arises is directionless braying that repeats and insists upon an establishment that feels like we should’ve been prepared before the insanity kicked in. It doesn’t feel like there are points where Elbek is allowed to stand steadfast with his own testimony, with the choices you make, but instead, a narrator who really oversteps their boundaries as a questionable entity. It’s an annoying concept, especially when Livber WANTS Elbek to establish the world around him also.
There are also repeated instances of what I can only describe as “creepypasta writing”. At its worst, its juvenile conceptions of madness – TyPiNg lIIIIIIIIKe ThiS….. – the kind of grating annoyances that’d upend a Pokémon ROM hack where Red says a curse word. It tends to overturn the generally surrealistic setting of Livber’s scenarios, and makes it all feel modernistic, in a relatively periodic title, with timelines and codexes to consider.
It’s hard to extract any sympathy for… anyone presented by the end of it. It’s truly, awfully difficult to come to any conclusions for the characters, other than “where have you been?”, “what have you done?”. Despite that glossary of Gaia and Livber coming in handy quite often, those two concepts don’t get the limelight they should contextually receive, especially when discussing the prejudice and distressing wrath Lilith faced at the hands of others.
Livber: Smoke and Mirrors | Final Verdict
I think Livber had a blueprint to succeed greatly. Those first few scenes where InEv is building the track are fascinating, but we’re on a road to nowhere. Despite its density, it’s underwritten, despite its history, it’s unexplained, and despite that fire, the fuel is lost in the agency to bring an unnecessarily airbrushed conclusion. Quick to stick to a plan that never involved you.
Livber: Smoke and Mirrors was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 3 hours of gameplay. All screenshots were taken during the process of review.
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