Lucah : Born of a Dream is a fascinating game that melds a clearly personal and traumatic story with a striking wireframe art style to create something that is undeniably unique but its approximative and often confusing gameplay hold it back from being something I can whole-heartedly recommend.
The plot is incredibly mysterious and obtuse, even for a soulslike. You awake on a beach and soon discover you are surrounded by flickering red nightmares, your own inner demons somehow brought to life. From there you’ll travel through a church, a train yard, a radio tower and more besides in an attempt to discover what’s happening and how to stop it. Story is dolled out at regular intervals by NPCs and a handful of written notes, but I’ll admit I was not entirely sure what was going on until I hit New Game Plus … which tranforms the game into a visual novel with walls of text to read that fill in some of the blanks.
To be honest, most soulslikes fans probably aren’t looking for a rich and detailed story in their games; it’s all about the exploration and combat mechanics. Lucah tries to mix the stamina management and parry mechanics of a souls fame with an isometric plane, and I’m not convinced it entirely works.
There are no weapons or armour in Lucah, only mantras, magic spells that confer various attacks and effects. The Aero mantra, for example, allows for fast, long-range, low-damage attacks, while the Thanatos mantra is the exact opposite, providing you with powerful hits at the cost of speed. You can assign one mantra to you light attack and one to your heavy attack, and all mantras confer passive bonuses too such as increased attack speed.
Your offensive panoply is supplemented by a familiar, a floating pet that follows you around and can unleash additional attacks or abilities by consuming “charge”, a currency you gain from damaging enemies. Finally, you can find or purchase a certain number of accessories called virtue, that range from utterly useless to nigh-essential, like slowing down time on a dodge or parrying projectiles.
Combat in Lucah is based around a simple principle: breaking the enemies guard either by whaling on them with attacks or parrying. Once stunned, they take massive amounts of damage for a short time, enough to kill most weaker enemies and take huge chunks of health off bosses.
Now, I’m fine with the mechanic in theory, but in practise I ran into quite a few problems. The controls aren’t quite tight enough to dodge effectively, and some of the parries are really finicky to pull off. You see, you don’t just have to press a button, you actually have to dodge into the attack to parry it. There’s a brief yellow flash to indicate a parryable attack, but it’s often drowned in the explosion of vibrant colours that fill the screen during melee, and even if you do get the timing down, the isometric plane makes it difficult to position yourself correctly, leading to more than one sword to the face.
This would be fine if there wasn’t another frustrating mechanic in the game: corruption. This percentage meter in the top right hand of the screen is constantly ticking upwards as you explore, and increases every time you die or take damage. If it reaches 100% … well that’s game over. No rollbacks, no previous saves, you have to start over again from scratch.
Even worse, there’s a certain ability you unlock late on in the game that makes you more powerful but increases corruption massively. I only used it for a few minutes and saw the meter shoot up over 10%.
I love exploration in my soulslikes, so having a ticking clock constantly pushing me forwards sapped some of the joy out of the game. Additionally, I like to play tanky, strength-based characters most of the time, but you’re really punished for doing so here as taking damage builds up corruption.
Luckily I managed to finish the game with the meter at around 90%, but there’s no way in hell I’d have played through the entire thing again. I touched on New Game plus earlier, and the developer made the interesting choice to dump a whole bunch of story details into the second playthrough, but also bumped up corruption increase to the point of having to no-hit most encounters or risk doing it all again.
These are all very personal and subjective grievances. Soulslike players who prefer to fight from a distance or rely on dodges over parries will likely not run into much trouble, as overall Lucah is not a very difficult game, especially once you unlock some of the more powerful mantras and virtues.
Unfortunately, this one just didn’t click for me
