As I have established in some of my other reviews, I am a pretty frequent reader of sites like Kotaku. Occasionally they will post snippets of a review of demos or obscure titles they might have found. I have to say from the visual styling of this one it did grab me pretty much immediately. Then they started throwing around the Dark Souls comparison. Yes, almost every game that is hard gets the Dark Souls comparison these days. But still, given the review it was worth a look.
It was only a demo then, and I do have to say that I came away from it pretty impressed. Certainly enough to look forward to purchasing the full version of the game to see what it was all about. Well it got released about or month or two ago so as soon as I had the window to fit it in between games I took the time to sit down with....
LUCAH: BORN OF A DREAM (Steam)
The story of Lucah: Born of a Dream is uh.... Honestly I don't even know if I can actually explain what the story of Lucah is. This is about as indie as games get. As I understand it from my play throughs, you play Lucah (or whatever name you prefer) is essentially a child who is cursed with a mark. People afflicted by this curse have their nightmares and trauma manifest as a physical reality.
To counter act this, some turn to faith in hope of a salvation. Some make a pilgrimage to something called the Null Sun to try to be free of it. Lucah isn't the only one afflicted by this. But it's usually around here where the story gets very muddied and interpretive. It is possible that this is taking place in reality, it is possible that Lucah is trapped in some dream state. All you as the player need to know is that your nightmares are dangerous, and you need to fight to survive.
Lucah is a strange title, but at its core I would say it's a hack n' slash adventure game in the vein of the top down Legend of Zelda's of old (you know, the good ones). It's also a title where I feel the Dark Souls comparison is apt because it does strongly use its combat system in this environment almost entirely to the letter. There is also a sprinkling of some RPG elements to the game so there is some customization to play around with as well.
First and foremost let's follow up on the combat. As you could guess from the souls comparison, you have a light and heavy attack system that drains from a stamina bar and dodge move that also draws from your stamina and has a number of invincibility frames. In lieu of magic you have a little support buddy that changes its function depending on what type you have set ranging in uses from rapid fire, spread shot, laser beam, healing, etc. This uses what we'll call our magic bar, and it restores by doing physical attacks. This basically forces you to balance using both.
Your attacks are based off things called Mantras. There are a pretty wide number of these and they all have different types of effects to cater to lots of play styles. Some of them are quick attacks that don't deal a lot of damage or break guards, but can land several before you need to dodge. Some of them slow heavy swings that take a moment to hit but can break a guard more quickly. Some of them provide ranged options and so forth. In addition to being able to mix and match what you want for your light and heavy (or both) you also have two slots to setup so you can flip between them on the fly for more situational usage. They also change up the charge attacks you can do for each attack button to mix up the variety even more.
The guard breaking mechanic is exceptionally important because it can absolutely make or break a fight for you. In a general sense many of the enemies can be very hard to bring down. You can alternate between shooting from your support and using your melee attacks, but the key is to keep the pace up. If you don't the guard rarely breaks and it becomes a test of attrition to survive the fights. With heavier attacks as mentioned before, you can break the guard. In addition to the attacks, a well timed dodge into an enemy actually parries an attack and breaks guard as well.
When it breaks you get a small window of time where the enemy is stunned in place and free to attack. It's in this window where their defense significantly drops so you want to be able to score hits. So now on top of trying to maintain aggression, you also have to balance your stamina usage so you have the available strikes when the guard does break, because you don't want to get caught without an attack when their defense is down.
The tension is also increased by a ticking percentage in the upper corner of your screen that represents your corruption. When you start the game it begins at zero, but the longer you fight the more that gauge increases. When it hits 100% you basically are ripped to a bad ending. You do get to see what you could be at full strength but after the end, you have to start over. After you get through your first playthrough of the game, you also are rewarded deductions to this gauge depending on how efficiently you dispatch your enemy. So again like the guard break and charge gauge, the game rewards aggression.
You also have a pair of items that you can use as well. One of them is a one time heal that allows you to completely restore your health, this recharges when you go to the various leveling checkpoints around the map. The other is the rewind ability, and this is pretty much exactly what you think it is. if in the event that you are going through a fight and you quickly learn that it is not going well, you can tap that rewind and immediately revert back to where you were healthwise and reset the room, hopefully for a better turn out on your next round.
Battles on the first run are rewarded with experience up to a 30 level cap. But interestingly, you can only chose between 4 upgrades per level and these upgrades change and alternate per selection, so it's next to impossible to just load up on one specific trait to imbalance your build. With the level cap, it is actually disservice to you to do so. They do eventually unlock a revert ability which allows you to rebuild your character on subsequent playthroughs.
I will say that the game is challenging, but there is a pretty decent amount of customization to that too. In addition to the difficulty settings, there are a pair of separate settings that can adjust how much damage you can deal, and how much damage you can take. After completing the game one time, you also unlock cheat menus that will allow you to have things like indefinitely charge, stamina, and so on if you want to just rip through the game to experience the story.
If you haven't already learned from the story description, the visual style and sound design supplement a very bleak picture. The visuals are probably the thing that first drew me towards this title. Graphically it is a very low-res with rough animations and character designs. I describe it as if someone animated it using colored chalk on a blackboard. I've also heard the comparison of neon as well. It's basically outlines of color on a black background with very jagged designs in almost a bouncing rubber hose animation.
But its rough look is not a sign of poor design, because the animations are clear and fluid, and the game moves an a pretty fast and satisfying pace for the action in a game of this nature. The impacts of attacks and guard breaks have what I call "ECW camera" where you have a series of short zooms at the impacts of big hits. It adds to what I often refer to as the combat weight and adds to the feel when you break a guard.
Lucah's sound design I am a bit less of a fan of. Its low-res nature to match the visuals is certainly fitting, but as you might expect of a game as bleak as the tone we are setting this one, there is a lot of low end droning in the music. A whole lot of low end beats to generally slower tempo'd music. There are a handful of tracks that I certainly liked better than others, and I did have a few stream watchers comment on how much they enjoyed the music, but it didn't particularly grab me.
I do have some complaints on this one though. First off, I don't know if the game's developer MeLessThanThree actually had a story in mind here. Or rather they had some feelings they strongly wanted to express, but I don't know if they had an actual story to tell. We have a whole lot of loose elements in play that seem like they interact with each other, but I don't know if they really do. You start off the story being chased by a nightmare, but this opening segment turns out to maybe be a dream? Then you start to meet other characters, and some of them give the inclination that they know you.
Then they also feed into the confusion that this maybe or may not be a real world and you may or may not be in a dream. Now we are getting into inception territory because the characters have real sparse memory about who they we before, and you are trying to pick up pieces of it through these separate interactions. There definitely is a connection to you, and some of them hold you responsible for their current plight.
But after stretches of incredibly sparse story telling, this game will go straight up Zork/Nier: Replicant and just wail on you with pages and pages of text dump telling a story of a pair of girls that may be angels who are under the control of this religious order. One of these girls may be the main character (you), and there is a big discussion about their inability to dream.
This is all confusing enough, but on subsequent playthroughs there are some side character stories. One that seems to be from a group of 3 mercenaries that play out in a JRPG fashion of them infiltrating the church to kill one of these girls, but they get attacked by the nondescript nightmares you have been fighting up until this point. The text can get incredibly dense and run for much longer than it needs to. I have played through the game multiple times and I don't feel any closer to understanding it if I am being honest. Allegedly there are branching story paths, but after a few plays I seem to be taking the same route every time.
And while on the whole I love this design style because of its uniqueness, I would be lying if I said that combat didn't turn into a mess during harrier portions of the game. Between trying to time my dodges and land hits, the sudden jarring zooms can make things a little confusing to what is actually happening. I have lost more than one fight because I thought I was parrying or dealing damage but in reality I was the one who was taking hits. But it zooms the same way so it can be very difficult to tell.
The difficulty curve is kinda messed up too. This game starts off incredibly challenging, not only because of the visual hiccups but some of the fights are actually pretty tough to balance your stamina, dodges, and your own attack speed. But then you get a healing support, and combat quickly becomes a breeze because you now have a pretty much limitless cache of healing to fall back on.
Even more so, after getting the bad ending (I believe) it allows you unlock probably the most savage mantra in the game which allows of fast, heavy hitting attacks that also can be used at a range. compile this with the healing from the paragraph above the fights now become laughably easy, even with difficulty modifiers added. There were points where I cranked up the difficulty with this build in place and I couldn't tell any significant difference.
Lastly I don't know if I full understand the whole map closing mechanic. See, as you move along the map sometimes a path will close off behind you. If you try to wander back into it, you will be blocked and be told "You are not brave/strong enough to enter the darkness". In the early stages there are parts of the map that locked off this way, so I assumed these would be open later in new games to give me the full story. But unless I'm not doing something right, they don't appear to ever unlock. So what is the purpose of making me thing there is something there?
There are also some sections of the map that if you venture too far forward, the darkness closes off behind you and you need to either loop around the map the long way to possibly backtrack to the checkpoint to save or level, or just be forced to press forward with the level even if perhaps you didn't want to. Again, this might be a matter of me not having unlocked the proper amount of game to do so, but at time of writing it feels like I have done all I can do in this one.
At the end of the day, Lucha: Born of a Dream is will probably not go down as world beater but it should be lauded for what it does very right. Games like this one are important because while it doesn't really come with an new mechanics that might blow you away, it does have a unique design to it that makes it stand out, it's competently developed, and I thought it was fun to play.
Sure, it has a lot of rough edge but I am willing to forgive them because it was done by a single indie developer who released a core concept demo for free, and when he got backed followed through with his core concept to make full game and released it at a fair price. I can't say for show how often I will go back to Lucah, but I very much enjoyed my time with the game and will probably play it a few more times. I would give it a recommendation.
When it breaks you get a small window of time where the enemy is stunned in place and free to attack. It's in this window where their defense significantly drops so you want to be able to score hits. So now on top of trying to maintain aggression, you also have to balance your stamina usage so you have the available strikes when the guard does break, because you don't want to get caught without an attack when their defense is down.
The tension is also increased by a ticking percentage in the upper corner of your screen that represents your corruption. When you start the game it begins at zero, but the longer you fight the more that gauge increases. When it hits 100% you basically are ripped to a bad ending. You do get to see what you could be at full strength but after the end, you have to start over. After you get through your first playthrough of the game, you also are rewarded deductions to this gauge depending on how efficiently you dispatch your enemy. So again like the guard break and charge gauge, the game rewards aggression.
You also have a pair of items that you can use as well. One of them is a one time heal that allows you to completely restore your health, this recharges when you go to the various leveling checkpoints around the map. The other is the rewind ability, and this is pretty much exactly what you think it is. if in the event that you are going through a fight and you quickly learn that it is not going well, you can tap that rewind and immediately revert back to where you were healthwise and reset the room, hopefully for a better turn out on your next round.
Battles on the first run are rewarded with experience up to a 30 level cap. But interestingly, you can only chose between 4 upgrades per level and these upgrades change and alternate per selection, so it's next to impossible to just load up on one specific trait to imbalance your build. With the level cap, it is actually disservice to you to do so. They do eventually unlock a revert ability which allows you to rebuild your character on subsequent playthroughs.
I will say that the game is challenging, but there is a pretty decent amount of customization to that too. In addition to the difficulty settings, there are a pair of separate settings that can adjust how much damage you can deal, and how much damage you can take. After completing the game one time, you also unlock cheat menus that will allow you to have things like indefinitely charge, stamina, and so on if you want to just rip through the game to experience the story.
If you haven't already learned from the story description, the visual style and sound design supplement a very bleak picture. The visuals are probably the thing that first drew me towards this title. Graphically it is a very low-res with rough animations and character designs. I describe it as if someone animated it using colored chalk on a blackboard. I've also heard the comparison of neon as well. It's basically outlines of color on a black background with very jagged designs in almost a bouncing rubber hose animation.
But its rough look is not a sign of poor design, because the animations are clear and fluid, and the game moves an a pretty fast and satisfying pace for the action in a game of this nature. The impacts of attacks and guard breaks have what I call "ECW camera" where you have a series of short zooms at the impacts of big hits. It adds to what I often refer to as the combat weight and adds to the feel when you break a guard.
Lucah's sound design I am a bit less of a fan of. Its low-res nature to match the visuals is certainly fitting, but as you might expect of a game as bleak as the tone we are setting this one, there is a lot of low end droning in the music. A whole lot of low end beats to generally slower tempo'd music. There are a handful of tracks that I certainly liked better than others, and I did have a few stream watchers comment on how much they enjoyed the music, but it didn't particularly grab me.
I do have some complaints on this one though. First off, I don't know if the game's developer MeLessThanThree actually had a story in mind here. Or rather they had some feelings they strongly wanted to express, but I don't know if they had an actual story to tell. We have a whole lot of loose elements in play that seem like they interact with each other, but I don't know if they really do. You start off the story being chased by a nightmare, but this opening segment turns out to maybe be a dream? Then you start to meet other characters, and some of them give the inclination that they know you.
Then they also feed into the confusion that this maybe or may not be a real world and you may or may not be in a dream. Now we are getting into inception territory because the characters have real sparse memory about who they we before, and you are trying to pick up pieces of it through these separate interactions. There definitely is a connection to you, and some of them hold you responsible for their current plight.
 |
| I tell myself the same thing every day. |
But after stretches of incredibly sparse story telling, this game will go straight up Zork/Nier: Replicant and just wail on you with pages and pages of text dump telling a story of a pair of girls that may be angels who are under the control of this religious order. One of these girls may be the main character (you), and there is a big discussion about their inability to dream.
This is all confusing enough, but on subsequent playthroughs there are some side character stories. One that seems to be from a group of 3 mercenaries that play out in a JRPG fashion of them infiltrating the church to kill one of these girls, but they get attacked by the nondescript nightmares you have been fighting up until this point. The text can get incredibly dense and run for much longer than it needs to. I have played through the game multiple times and I don't feel any closer to understanding it if I am being honest. Allegedly there are branching story paths, but after a few plays I seem to be taking the same route every time.
And while on the whole I love this design style because of its uniqueness, I would be lying if I said that combat didn't turn into a mess during harrier portions of the game. Between trying to time my dodges and land hits, the sudden jarring zooms can make things a little confusing to what is actually happening. I have lost more than one fight because I thought I was parrying or dealing damage but in reality I was the one who was taking hits. But it zooms the same way so it can be very difficult to tell.
The difficulty curve is kinda messed up too. This game starts off incredibly challenging, not only because of the visual hiccups but some of the fights are actually pretty tough to balance your stamina, dodges, and your own attack speed. But then you get a healing support, and combat quickly becomes a breeze because you now have a pretty much limitless cache of healing to fall back on.
Even more so, after getting the bad ending (I believe) it allows you unlock probably the most savage mantra in the game which allows of fast, heavy hitting attacks that also can be used at a range. compile this with the healing from the paragraph above the fights now become laughably easy, even with difficulty modifiers added. There were points where I cranked up the difficulty with this build in place and I couldn't tell any significant difference.
Lastly I don't know if I full understand the whole map closing mechanic. See, as you move along the map sometimes a path will close off behind you. If you try to wander back into it, you will be blocked and be told "You are not brave/strong enough to enter the darkness". In the early stages there are parts of the map that locked off this way, so I assumed these would be open later in new games to give me the full story. But unless I'm not doing something right, they don't appear to ever unlock. So what is the purpose of making me thing there is something there?
There are also some sections of the map that if you venture too far forward, the darkness closes off behind you and you need to either loop around the map the long way to possibly backtrack to the checkpoint to save or level, or just be forced to press forward with the level even if perhaps you didn't want to. Again, this might be a matter of me not having unlocked the proper amount of game to do so, but at time of writing it feels like I have done all I can do in this one.
At the end of the day, Lucha: Born of a Dream is will probably not go down as world beater but it should be lauded for what it does very right. Games like this one are important because while it doesn't really come with an new mechanics that might blow you away, it does have a unique design to it that makes it stand out, it's competently developed, and I thought it was fun to play.
Sure, it has a lot of rough edge but I am willing to forgive them because it was done by a single indie developer who released a core concept demo for free, and when he got backed followed through with his core concept to make full game and released it at a fair price. I can't say for show how often I will go back to Lucah, but I very much enjoyed my time with the game and will probably play it a few more times. I would give it a recommendation.
Seriously, the moment you unlock the Aether Mantra,
You become death incarnate.
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