5 reviews liked by ElMetan


As many on the internet in various obsessive communities, be those that are directed to videogames as we are as a user base on Backloggd or those in any group directed to TV or film or music, I was, but no longer am, Christian for a long part of my life. I was raised traditionally Mennonite with some Québécois Catholic thrown in from the paternal side; the worldview that formed my conscious ability to conceive of ethics, identity, metaphysics, and politics was derived firstly from those sources, holisms that wrapped up the world and all its gidgets in aphorisms and dictates. Even though I haven’t practised any form of Christian worship or devotion in a decade, the root of anything which would fall on the dichotomous structure of sinful or virtuous fruits in how I act on those things today. Sex, criticism, depression, ontology, epistemology: they are all consciously pursued by me now with an agnostic mind, but they are all unconsciously commented on by zealotry that informed the base colours and chemicals that have led to future complex makeups I engage with as an adult. What I can believe in now is not hermetically arrived at, but is in conversation with what I once believed, what was agreed upon with myself as possible to believe. Regardless of the pleasure or share of human capability I have with the world or with the world’s cast, I will inevitably have a pall of millenia’s old stricture bearing down on whatever I intercede with on this world-which-is-not-our-home.

Of course, this is no new sentiment, and was no new sentiment when it was uttered and seen practised in the bible. As I said, this is a disposition that is common on the cross continental internet, which as a platform is one of the only things other than Catholicism that has managed to touch every corner of the earth. There is very little, beyond religion, that is as universal in social constructs as falling out of religion. Despite this, there feels to be a bit of a dearth in media which engages with the melancholy or outright torment that one feels by having to constantly engage with the self-assessment that comes with negating one’s own internalised rule of decorum set about by a gestation of religious fervour: The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon is one prominent story, and there are some further examples which more examine the immediate falling out of faith, such as Unorthodox or possible readings of Pentiment or Women Talking. These are a few that I pulled off the top of my head, and while I’m sure there are more, I am surprised at how few are able to be spontaneously conjured. Here though, in that murky and raw inexpressible prevalence, is Lucah, which is so full to the brim with the bitterness and traumatic violence that is ushered out of having to reject one’s universal localising roots that it seems to loom larger than any indie game of its scale could normally expect.

Despite the rarity of seeing this phenomenon in modern fictions, this type of account is such a broad topic in part because of the uniquity of the details inherent within any individual’s account of the experience detailing their respective journey. It may be a semi-universal experience, but the emotional tribulations or catalytic elements encountering each other in the process are all respective to the individual who would be called upon to recount their experiences, which might read as implausible to their audience of similar experientialists, in a fiction. Whereas some leave the church because of merely ecclesiastical differences, taking on a new type of agnostic mysticism as guiding religious principles, others leave the church because of varied and systemic abuses sustained over the childhoods, adolescences, and adulthoods of generations. This second case matches the tone of Lucah but because of specific lacks to any personal experience, or investigations into any experience specifically that might relate to anything in common emotion other than petulance, the mood and iconography reads as incredibly trite. Without discounting melessthan3’s development team and their personal histories with organised religion, the lack of nuanced characterisation of Lucah’s cast (the mostly void character of Lucah themselves doesn’t really bother me given that being a well established trend in games overall and in the inspirations Lucah draws from specifically) give the spectacle and motivation of play within the game an enormously tacky quality of ignorant rebellion, something more akin to terrible 2000s atheism than to something like Diary of a Country Priest or Job’s suffering. Gladiatorial arenas populated by a fattened clergy that sexually get off on watching children rabidly bludgeon each other to death may be something which could horrifyingly come to light out of missionary practices in colonised countries, but without biographical relation to events or characterisation that seems drawn on and related to it as something which specifically, poignantly, underlines that as a source of trauma for Lucah, the entire scene comes across as tasteless and broad without insight or commentary (and of course it should go without saying that that must also be said well, not merely said). This all goes without saying that the world of Lucah is posited as a purgatorial afterlife, or at least an adjunct from the reality we would attach human experience to, which could be read as a commentary on how fucked up the afterlifes of Christian theology are (although any reading of modern theological understandings of Hell and Heaven thoroughly discount the type of medieval eternal suffering posited in ancient accounts and popular fiction; of course, Lucah, being a personal account as opposed to a ontological refutation, does not account for this, which renders the narrative even thinner) but without good writing or characterisation of the setting direly reads as horrific resignation to a suffering at the hands of evil church doers who are in fact correct about everything, from ethics down to where the sinners descend and what their roles in whatever afterlife they are sent to must be.

Unfortunately, the sparseness of characterisation that plagues the plotting and cast of Lucah extends to the combat mechanics, which in their way have some base satisfaction in their arrangement but suffer from a counteracting flaw that is created in the joining of the game’s major influences. The main thing I’ve heard in regards to the combat is that it is souls-like, and that the combat’s orientation is scaffolded like a metroidvania. I agree with both assessments but paint them as negative and contradictory herein; one of the excellent things about souls combat is that the toolbox is open from the beginning - you may exchange weapons and power up, but the combinations of possible attack methods are available from the get to the player. Soul level 1 with a broken straight sword is as valid an option to beat Gwyn as a level 10 chaos zweihander. The breadth of the combat is available to master and learn and is tuned to that player ability focused progression from the first hollow to the god of hollows. Metroidvanias on the other hand, are tuned so that the PC progresses in strength, and while you become more skilled as a player throughout the experience, and one reaches mastery as the game unfolds what is possible to do. The cat in Gato Roboto can’t save its owner because it hasn’t progressed enough to do so, and so the player is equally disempowered to do so.

The melding of these two styles of progression in Lucah then obviously presents a problem. The structure of the combat is built like souls but metes out what is possible in that playspace, through the RPG levelling system not just increasing stats but also giving new abilities to turn the possibilities of combat, like SOTY. This means that the early combat encounters are not only disempowering, and the later ones overpowered, but that Lucah’s combat is dull in its encounter design for 80% of the experience, something which the more level/enemy design progression of Souls never has to reckon with. Of course, there is also the unfortunate lack of enemy variety and non-existent level variety (in terms of actual affect to the combat held within, the variety of flavour is mediocre - not terrible, not great) hindering the experience, but the wrapping being poor is less harmful than the contents.

Overall, Lucah is a childish experience: the PC is growthless, the world is hostile without reason or an inclusively perverse justification, the amenities and relationships within seem to be built out of proximity and not actual affinity. Everything about it reads like a kindergarten story that has an edge of no emotional growth. I understand the trauma of stunted understandings born out a typically North American pitiful religion of retribution, but regardless of the sympathy one can have for such a work’s author, if the work is as lifeless and worthy of scorn as the religion which it paints as being so pitiless and ugly, than the world of Lucah seems to be made by a god no better than that which it accuses.

It’s all fun until your favorite plague doctor steps on a nail and dies

i just played for 9 hours straight & i still don't get it. my eyes are dry. i rest to play again tomorrow.

The "best pokemon game" turned out to be the most bog standard bland JRPG ever!!!!!!!!!!

my mom bought me this for christmas one year, but when christmas day came the present was not found under the christmas tree. my parents suspected one of my friends to have stolen it, but i didn't believe them. sometime later, it was confirmed that friend had become somewhat of a klepto

ben if you're reading this, i want you to know that.......






dang man that was pretty messed up to steal someone's christmas gift i hope you still feel bad for that to this day




also shoutouts to my mom for buying me another copy love you mom