“Ask your girlfriend how to play this game” was one of the considered taglines for Luxuria Superbia, Auriea Harvey revealed in an interview with Hip Hop Gamer at Indiecade. Indeed, she points out that most of the women who demo’d it at the event played it better than the men.

Luxuria Superbia is a suggestive, flirtatious, and spiritual exploration of intimacy, faith, and gaming. In Luxuria Superbia, the player experiences levels as flowers, which burst into bloom as the player interacts with its buds. The player can charge straight through a level, collecting all of the items and triggering the end of the level, however, this results in a low score and failed level. The objective of Luxuria Superbia is to prolong pleasure, not rush toward an objective. The game encourages the player to immerse themselves in the flower, enjoying the experience, rather than charging through to the finish.

As the player progresses through the flowers, the flower speaks to them, giving encouragement and telling the player how it likes to be touched. The marriage of intimacy and explicit consent in Luxuria Superbia is present all throughout the game, as the player must follow the wishes of the flowers in order to succeed at the game.

Joy and entertainment figure largely into what makes Luxuria Superbia what it is as a game. In the same interview, Harvey says Tale of Tales “wanted to put something nice into the world and into people’s lives”. Acknowledging the love and entertainment value in gaming is refreshing–in an industry in which games are made for money, for expansions into existing universes, for experiments into realism and grittiness and cynicism, the production of a game to be “something nice” is surprisingly wonderful.
Luxuria Superbia is a love letter to its players, to female sensuality, to entertainment, and to love itself. Consent and joy and beauty are not concepts which need be in direct opposition to video games, as Luxuria Superbia shows. For in Luxuria Superbia, they are all one and the same.