Lucah: Born of a Dream is a neon crash of allusive storytelling, deliberate top-down combat, and distressed, manic ambience. Its indirect means of expression risks losing the player in its internal contradictions—it's hysterical and tender, it's demanding and soothing—but tenacious pandemonium is also its objective. Lucah: Born of a Dream seeks an audience that can relate to its world without needing to make explicit sense of its features.
Lucah: Born of a Dream is a convergence of three disparate systems of expression. Its narrative is an amalgamation of the isolation of adolescence, the overbearing pressure of conforming to the status quo, and the chaos of trying to unify a public and private identity. Its top-down combat has roots in the Souls trinity of magic, health, and stamina, and shares a fondness for intense difficulty and the priority of animation. Lucah: Born of a Dream’s presentation seeks to join both under the image of a neon sketchbook, using its a highly-stylized aesthetic of impressionism to relate themes of confusion and trauma.
Despite Lucah: Born of a Dream’s modest foundation (it was successfully Kickstarted in 2017 with just $22,000), its completed architecture is ultimately sound. It is not an easy game to play, interpret, or digest, but not by a failure of design or execution. As the chaos and disarray of Where Is My Heart? was meant to juxtapose tension and love between family members, Lucah: Born of a Dream’s methods of expression are meant to convey the disharmony and confusion of lost soul. Any number of conclusions can be drawn or assumed from its structure, plot, and perspective
Even its opening, a realm of gaming where a premise is fairly easy to dissolve, is subject to interpretation. The player character, or whatever you choose your name to be, is introduced as having been “Marked” and trapped in a cosmic nightmare. Red-outlined, menacing demons serve as physical manifestations of the nightmare. The player moves across and through shaded settings of devastated nature, decaying urban landscapes, and provocative religious imagery. Along the way, and usually between demons, are hopeless acolytes pledging apocalyptic faith to an enigmatic Cardinal and a handful of yellow-outlined peers in various stages of an identical predicament. Hope is rarely around the corner.
Lucah: Born of a Dream’s implicit narrative has a full subscription to the detached, ambiguous nature of dream logic. The player drifts in-and-out of hostile interactions with presumed companions, ambles through brief moments of whimsical grace with Familiars, and rummages across monstrously violent pits of destruction full of demons. All the while you’re provided with pieces of an identity—a videotape with a dream, conversations with vaguely familiar people, limitless rage from a presumed rival—that the player can use to author their character’s story. Lucah: Born of a Dream’s pieces are scattered and may not all fit together, but the presence of each one feels deliberate and significant. Each one is placed with precision.
It was not a burden to recognize the plight of Lucah: Born of a Dream’s protagonist without specifically connecting with their suffering. I don’t identify as non-binary, I’ve never experienced hesitation with my identity, and I haven’t had much trouble being myself around other people (I have endured twelve years of Catholic school education, which certainly helped me bridge certain aspects). With that said, the frazzled screen shaking, the annoyed questions by non-player characters and their dismissive attitudes, and the constant presentation of life-detonating ultimatums relayed a pure, persistent sense of desperation.
Lucah: Born of a Dream’s emotional punch really connected when I attacked a defenseless Christian (my presumed rival in this nightmare) after a multi-phase fight. They had fallen down for a second or third time and, not wanting them to get an advantage when they got back up, I ran up and just whaled on the body with everything I had. What are you doing?—it may have all been capital letters—formed as their dialogue on the bottom of the screen. Oh shit, I thought to myself, was that optional? Did I not have to attack them again? Lucah: Born of a Dream is full of moments of undetermined consequence. All the way through to its ending, I’m not sure what could have steered my experience and my story down a different road. Like Undertale, I don’t know what it’s measuring and what my choices, or lack of choice, may entail. I found this fascinating.
Combat, on the other hand, provides a more familiar way of speaking to the player. A Health meter, a Charge meter, and a Stamina meter all provide options. Stamina consumes two melee attacks, light and heavy. Charge, which is drawn by performing melee attacks, is expanded when charging melee attacks or employing a Familiar (a nearby hovering friend) for ranged attacks. Health is health. Enemies spawn, usually in groups, in de facto arenas and the player is typically locked out of progression until every demon is dealt death. Failure resets to a checkpoint and all enemies respawn.
Customization options, found as glowing items in Lucah: Born of a Dream’s environments, are wide open. Attacks options, called Mantras, and are separated by different values for range, attack power, and a special perk (like increasing the power of finishing blows or creating a higher Break chance). Each Mantra can be slotted into either the light or heavy button. Ranged options are the aforementioned Familiars, offering abilities like a shotgun-spread, a laser-focused attack, a Break-friendly pierce, or the relatively overpowered (and late game) heal option. Mantras and Familiars can be grouped into two Paradigms, which can be switched on-the-fly during battle.
Virtues add another wrinkle. Essentially composing a series of buffs, Virtues can reflect enemy projectiles with well-timed Mantra attacks, reduce enemy attack damage, or increase the power of dash and parry attacks. Virtues weighted with numbers and gated by a point total. That total can be increased at Lucah: Born of a Dream’s obscure merchant.
Tech is the final and most enigmatic category. Inside Tech were basic options like clearing the screen of user interface icons. It also listed the abilities I had learned, like parrying, taunting, and another that is unlocked fairly late in the game. Finally, Tech also housed what appeared to be a series of cheat options; Tech could boost my health, grant infinite stamina, infinite charge meter, make all enemies weak, and make all items infinite.
I never used any of Lucah: Born of a Dream’s Tech options! The idea of cheating seemed antithetical to the struggle my character was forced to endure. My game-criticism-poisoned brain also rejected the notion of consuming a product in any form other than default, ignoring that Lucah: Born of a Dream’s author included options for a reason. Accessibility is an undervalued asset for a modern game and it’s wonderful that these options exist. You should use them if you’re having trouble and the only reason I didn’t is because I am broken. Helping people finish a game is always positive.
Combat prowess arrives with a scary-but-predictable learning curve. Few enemies have threatening ranged attacks, making it attractive to fire Familiars off from a safe distance. The Charge meter can only be built with melee attacks, which demands the player get in close to build that meter. This (or at least how I played) because a process of letting the enemy cycle their attacks until I saw a window, then I popped in for a quick combo. I rarely performed Charge attacks. I got the shit kicked out of me frequently, or at least I did until I found the damage-heavy Thanatos Mantra.
Creating a Break status on the enemy seems to be Lucah: Born of a Dream’s all-consuming objective. Taking enough successive damage, along with some other Virtue-enhanced options, lead the enemy to a disabled state of weakness, Break. The damage value significantly increases while they’re in a Break state. With my luck I usually achieved Break just as my Stamina ran empty, and I think that was very much the point. What I wanted, while attainable, was part of a world that was designed to always leave it just out of reach.
Lucah: Born of a Dream becomes more demanding as its play clock and enemy count increase. The dodge/run mechanic consumes the Stamina meter and, in my experience, was used more often than melee attacks. Lucah: Born of a Dream provides a generous helping of i-frames (when enemy’s attack, if the dodge is timed properly, can be negated despite an apparent direct hit) and the timing window, while not initially comfortable, can be learned and executed with relative ease. In most of my battles, especially with the health bar-reviving monsters toward the end of the game, were spent with my character running all over the screen and only getting close when I had confidence in parrying attacks I recognized.
A Corruption meter proved to be a constant enigma. A permanent fixture of the upper-right corner of the screen, the Corruption meter rises in tenths of percentage points while Lucah: Born of a Dream is active. It raises a few whole numbers with each death. It reached one hundred when I was almost finished with the game, but a benevolent entity intercepted the consequences and set it back to 50% percent. I finished around 80% (I had set Sin and Punishment, which I interpreted as two measures of Lucah: Born of a Dream’s difficulty from normal to easy shortly before it reached 100% the first time).
I have no idea what the consequences of a full Corruption meter are. This is level of information is probably inadequate given that I am writing a review of Lucah: Born of a Dream and, presumably, should have a grasp on the game’s basic functions. I don’t! I can report that it was successful in producing a game-spanning sense of anxiety that increased exponentially upon every death and every massive rise in percentage. Like Sekiro’s lingering Dragon Rot disease, it was always in the back—and sometimes the front!—of my mind as I moved through its world.
The perspective of Lucah: Born of a Dream shifts a few degrees after its completion. I have confidence that, with respect to separate end states, my ending was my ending. Your ending will always be yours, too, but it’s followed by additional information and a New Game Plus entity that remixes, reexamines, and expands Lucah: Born of a Dream’s challenge and its narrative. Circumstance is still widely open to interpretation, but its premise, with what amounts of a visual novella, provides a more insightful starting point. The entire approach still functions inside of Lucah: Born of a Dream’s world.
Lucah: Born of a Dream features a protagonist who, in wishing for the end, inspires the player to keep playing. It’s a powerful irony that reflects their tortured existence. This positions Lucah: Born of a Dream in the same class of Dys4ia in that successfully imparts effects of a world I share but do not inhabit. It’s socially instructive in addition to being an inspired and artistically gorgeous riff on the Souls series’ menacing game plan. Despite playing other games like Lucah: Born of a Dream—I’ve referenced a half dozen in this piece—none hit all of the same points the same way. Lucah: Born of a Dream is unique in its ambition, objective, and execution.
Lucah: Born of a Dream is a neon crash of allusive storytelling, deliberate top-down combat, and distressed, manic ambience. Its indirect means of expression risks losing the player in its internal contradictions—it’s hysterical and tender, it’s demanding and soothing—but tenacious pandemonium is also its objective. Lucah: Born of a Dream seeks an audience that can relate to its world without needing to make explicit sense of its features.
