Playing Lucah is like being swept along by a great dark river. While broadly a hack-and-slash game, it is always dragging you beyond such labels and into something more lively, tormented and fluid. There may be solid ground beneath your feet but the world appears unfinished, transient, its linework writhing and shivering against a pure black plane, as though unhappy in its own skin. You wander for a while amid the stark eruptions of trees and scribbles of barbed wire, searching for a door key or a checkpoint. You fight a few bladed, cloudy apparitions, tearing their guts out with serrated words of power. And then you find something – a person, a precipice, a peculiar tangle of light – and the water closes overhead. Solidity blinks out, and you are tossed on the flow with a host of memories, bursting open before you in bald white type.
Letters have different sounds. Sometimes, they squeak like fingers on glass. Sometimes, they clatter like gunshots. Between passages you’ll catch glimpses of seabirds, dead suns and screaming faces, after-images snatched from the dark like mouthfuls of air. These memories, written in first or second-person, are only loosely tethered to characters and don’t fit neatly into a plot; all have some basis in the Roman Catholic upbringing and emotional travails of the game’s creator, Colin Horgan.
Lucah: Born of a Dream reviewDeveloper: melessthanthreePublisher: Syndicate Atomic LLCPlatform played: PCAvailability: Out now on PC and Switch (North American eShop only)
Lucah’s status as memoir and “mood piece” operates like acid on what it borrows from both Christian scripture and games like Bayonetta. It dissolves everything into something you’ve not quite seen before. At times, it is a visual novel that makes a show of the player’s futility, presenting you with dialogue options only to grey out all save one. Elsewhere, it extrudes and plays with the apparatus of design, offering up its own 2015 prototype as an arcade game within the game titled “I am not a machine”. On some level it is a piece of music: areas are labelled “tracks” and divided into “verses”, while your customisable combat styles are called “mantras”. In the course of this shape-shifting, Lucah rescues the much-abused term “immersive” from banality; it is “immersive” in the sense that for much of its length, it denies you the distance you need to clearly picture its form. Rather than making its mystery a question of lore, it delves into the psychological potential of the video game as blackbox, reacting to user input but unknowable and not quite predictable, a well into which stones are dropped without the certainty of hearing a splash.
Lucah may not be your classic A-to-B quest, but it does begin somewhere. The game’s protagonist is a cursed soul, battling for some kind of identity against the cowled eminences of a religious state and their own, all-too-tangible Nightmares. Following a (probably?) unwinnable fight with a mighty Harbinger creature, you awaken on a forested shore. A white spectre greets you, like Virgil greeting Dante, and invites you to find your way to the realm’s centre. The ensuing landscapes slide from cathedrals and caves to scenes of modern urban decrepitude. You’ll visit a metro station that evokes Silent Hill 4, and a pier where phantoms swirl like the undone crowds of The Wasteland. Everywhere you go you find other, defeated travellers, slumped against walls, fantasising about non-existence or clawing at a fading capacity to feel. And everywhere you go, you leave fire, blood and silence in your wake.
It’s the kind of limbo we recognise from Playdead’s work, a scene of both socio-economic and spiritual collapse. Ticking along throughout your voyage is a Corruption metre, which imposes a variable time limit on your journey. Allow it to fill before you’ve found your way to the bottom of the labyrinth, and you’ll trigger one of three endings. The timer feature sounds sadistic – it jumps forward a couple of percentage points whenever you perish – but is pretty gentle by the standards of video game Doomsday Clocks. It pauses during dialogue or when reading menus, and on Normal difficulty, I had no trouble reaching the final boss (with time for the odd detour in search of a secret room and a new mantra) before the Corruption swallowed me.