But ever since its release, players have been reporting issues with the game's lighting causing MCs with darker skin tones to look weirdly shadowed, or occasionally become totally invisible during certain cutscenes. The complaints go back to the launch of the game and are still being posted as recently as this week.

Players experiencing this issue say they've reported it to Infold many times, and recently, IGN received a small flood of submissions to its tips email aliases from players upset about the issue. Until now, Infold hasn't said anything about the issue at all. But when IGN reached out for comment, Infold provided the following statement:

“At Infold Games, we’ve always believed that our games are shaped together with the players who love them. The community’s feedback, discussions, and creative passion are what keep Love and Deepspace evolving and alive.
We’ve seen the conversations and truly value everyone who has taken the time to share their experiences and thoughts. Every comment, whether it’s about visuals, storytelling, or representation, helps us better understand how our work resonates across different perspectives and cultures.
Love and Deepspace is, at its heart, a shared world of emotion and imagination. We hope to keep building it hand in hand with our players, learning and improving together along the way.”

Love and Deepspace players are understandably frustrated by this issue. After all, the game has explicitly been promoted by the company for its extremely in-depth technical achievements in getting every detail of the characters to feel real: hair, skin, clothing, everything. It would be one thing if this was a one-time issue with one card that was quickly fixed. But after two years and absolutely no acknowledgement, players with darker skin are linking the problem to long-time issues in games with racism and colorism. Even if it's not intentionally malicious, they say, it all goes back to developers prioritizing making sure white skin tones look good, and only throwing in darker skin tones as an afterthought, without taking care to make sure they look just as nice.

https://pk.ign.com/love-and-deepspace/246899/news/love-and-deepspace-devs-respond-to-player-complaints-that-their-dark-skinned-custom-characters-are-i

Interview with IGN about lighting issue