Imagine you live in a world where a virus could cause people to commit random acts of violence or organize group suicides. Now imagine you have telepathic abilities and you could detect this virus in people and remove it. Sounds pretty cool, huh? Well, Ignition Entertainment managed to take a great idea and bore you to death with it.

In Lux-Pain you take on the role of Atsuki Saijo a member of FORT whose goal is to eliminate the virus known as "Silent". You're tasked with going undercover at a local high school to find "patient zero", the first person infected with "Silent". Along the way you under the mysterious origin of the virus.

Again, sounds cool. Unfortunately, the game is completely linear. You follow the story along from point to point gathering information with the game holding your hand the entire way. The translation is horrible and there are time when it's even comical. It's unfortunate that such an artistically pleasing and well-acted game could suffer so much from lack of game play and poor translation.

When you actually encounter someone infected with "Silent" the game play is as exciting as rubbing a scratch and sniff sticker, without the nice scent of blueberries or chocolate. You literally scratch away reality with the pen on the DS to find the virus, remove it and then implant it to gather more information from the infected individual. This is tedious at times because if you rub too much searching for the virus you could wipe the person's psyche from their mind. Once you gather information from the person it's placed into a log for you to reference.

There are some added features like a bulletin board, email and cellphone but they add little to the game and can even be distracting. Even worse are the lengthy chats you have to endure just to find out that someone went home for the day.

The game has multiple endings based upon which "Silent" viruses you've removed. You might be able to see one or two of them if you can manage to stay awake. I found the free art book that came with the game more interesting than the game itself.