Lucah: Born of a Dream

released on Aug 21, 2018

A top-down hack-and-slash where Lucah must fight to reclaim their identity from the grasp of the Nightmare monsters that inhabit the dream-like land. Lucah: Born of a Dream features a hand-drawn surrealist artstyle and contains heavy themes relating to organized religion, queerness and suppression of one's identity through indoctrination.


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wokescold videogame with things to say

Really incredible story told in a unique and abstract way, facilitated by some extremely fun top-down souls-like combat.
The art-style here is what probably grabs most people when they first look at the game, and it is incredible how much is able to be achieved and conveyed with what are essentially coloured scribbles made to look as unsettling as possible. There's not really any points where attack animations feel unclear, or hit boxes felt wrong, which is really impressive.
Along with this, the game boasts a really strong soundtrack, which definitely helps with some of the more difficult sections of the game. From industrial sharp tracks like The Underground to more melancholic ones like A Dream, there's a lot on offer here, and it all sounds really great while maintaining the whole unsettling feeling of the game.
As mentioned before, the gameplay is very souls-like, with slightly more hack and slash elements mixed into combat. There are some exploration elements, to get new virtues, mantras, or familiars (passives, weapons, and ranged skills respectively) and a lot of combinations between those three to personalize combat to your own playstyle, or just to keep things fresh while going through. Combat itself feels really great for the most part, parrying feels great, near enough every enemy has a parry-able attack and most have only parry-able attacks, so there's definitely reward for players who want to be more proactive, while also not punishing more reactive playstyles. The biggest issue I can think of is the lack of any i-frames after being hit but also a time where you can't dodge, meaning that it's really easy to get chain attacked and die after only one mistake, which can feel unfair with some of the more annoying attacks in the game.
I think the real surprising thing was how good the writing was, while definitely unconventional in both how it's conveyed to the player and how it's written, there's a really heart-wrenching and beautiful story here, with some absolutely incredible queer representation and themes of shifting relationships and finding oneself approached in really mature and thoughtful ways; and the want to find out more about the world and characters definitely helps to get through some of the harder sections of this game.
The only major flaw I can really think is the in-game timer, while I think most people will beat the normal game in only one or two playthroughs, the corruption meter becomes way more punishing on NG+. Luckily, there's a really cool way of keeping it down introduced, but I could definitely see it being a turn-off for a lot of people, especially considering that it is arguably the hardest part of NG+ apart from a potential oversight that can make it entirely negligible. This all is definitely alleviated by each playthrough only really taking a max of 4 or 5 hours, so I'm very willing to accept it as a fun challenge as you don't really lose all that much from a lost run.
I really loved this though, I'm a sucker for more abstract art styles and story telling, which this has in abundance; and while I can definitely see the challenge falling into being really aggravating for a lot of people, I had a lot of fun over my three or four playthroughs to get the true ending, would love to go back and do the DLC at some point and really looking forward to the follow up.

true ending route was way too hard for me but the story is good enough that i want to run it back

il.problema di lucah è che è un gioco relativamente corto ma che ci mette un po' a rendere il combat system comprensibile, una volta perfezionato si ha penso non solo un gioco molto divertente nonostante la sua perpetua rocciosità ma anche...una bella storia? Onestamente devo fare il ng+ da un anno e mezzo quindi so che mi mancano delle robe ma va beh lo riprenderò in mano sicuramente

Really visually unique hld-esq hack and slash. The in-game timer kind of pissed me off but i wouldn't have stolen my name from this games main character if the game didnt impress something upon me.

Immensely unsure how to record my feelings on this one. For one thing, I'm not sure whether "completed" or "abandoned" is the proper tag, as it seems to be one of those games that requires a ng+ cycle or two to really complete. I find a star rating equally elusive: it's usually a very bad sign when a stubborn ass like me actually drops a game out of frustration, but on analysis I think it would really only take one or two tweaks to take the combat from where it is to being genuinely fantastic.

As it stands, there's a lot to like about the combat. You can create your own (basic) combos by mapping weapons to light and heavy attack independently, and each weapon has a passive effect stapled to it that affects your overall handling. This plus the ranged weapons and badge system add up to a surprisingly engaging character-building system considering the simplicity of the combat. The fact that attacking and dodging feel as good as they do despite every attack animation being "an MSPaint scribble shows up for a frame" is wild, too. No idea how they did that one.

Unfortunately, the whole thing is sunk by some poor balancing decisions. The biggest flaw is a lack of protection against taking multiple hits simultaneously, which means that a single mistake is often enough to kill. This only gets amplified in the final boss and beyond into the NG+ cycles, where one-shots become so common that HP upgrades end up being functionally worthless (in fact, there's a particular upgrade that I'd argue makes them actively detrimental). Although the first playthrough is generally easy, the harsh punishment for death makes unlucky situations like this feel completely intolerable.

Said punishment is the Corruption meter, which is constantly ticking up and will forcibly end your playthrough if it hits 100%. This is a neat idea, although it disincentivizes exploration and on my first playthrough led me to miss a lot of tools (I also didn't know I had a map, which didn't help). I imagine it would feel awful to scrape your way to the final area only to have victory taken from you by this meter, but that didn't happen to me and it's a short enough game that it's probably not the worst thing in the world.

What is the worst thing in the world is ending up in NG+ underleveled, missing half the tools, having to repeat the bad end sequence (which includes its own boss fight!) every ten minutes thanks to the much harsher corruption penalty, effectively soft-locking the save file.

Much of what I've read about Lucah is focused on its raw and personal narrative, and I feel like a total jackass for spending my review on mechanical nitpicking in that light. I don't know much of the story myself, as it's sparsely told in the first playthrough and the connective tissue needed to make sense of it only starts showing up in NG+. From what I saw, I can believe there's some good stuff further in, but I think the story could have easily done more to hook me before asking so much investment and effort.

To the game's credit, there are a bevy of difficulty and accessibility options, so if you really want to see where the story's going and you don't have terminal gamer-brain like I do then there's really nothing stopping you from doing so. But by the time I'd gotten around to considering that option, the game's spell over me had broken. I was out, and I didn't feel like going back in - on those terms, or on any.