Lucah: Born of a Dream

High concept scribbles

Why

Why Not

Impressions

I bought this a while ago after being drawn in by the raw, sketchy art-style then forgot about it for a while. I had some reservations about how good the actual gameply would be since enemies being collections of abstract art doesn't really lend itself to visual clarity, but I'm happy to report other than some minor clipping issues the combat is really fun.

I guess I'd describe the combat as fast souls-like; you have your health/magic/stamina bars (hitting enemies replenishes magic), a dodge roll with i-frames and even a parry. Despite the faster pace stamina management matters more than something like Elden Ring, you can only get a few light attacks or a single heavy while still having stamina for a dodge. You can get Virtues (perks) which alleviate this like fully regenerating your stamina on a perfect dodge or reducing stamina use at full health, but you'll miss out on a variety of other useful Virtues to use them.

You can also build your own playstyle in a way with the Mantra system (kinda like stances); you can have two active at a time and they change the way your basic attacks work, adding or reducing range/speed/power/crit or applying some special effect. These are also kind of a 'choose your own difficulty' system, especially the one you get right after starting NG+ which rapidly fires multiple shockwaves covering half the arena.

And you'll be seeing NG+ if you want even the slightest clue what's happening, two big exposition dumps which give a lot of context are locked behind it. I don't mind this so much because it's a short game, but there's not really enough differences in NG+ gameplay to make it truly worthwhile. I guess that's why you get the OP Virtue, in case you just want to speedrun through for the alternative endings.

Overall a very cool little game that's creative and artsy, plus it's regularly on sale for ~300yen. Definitely give it a try if the style looks interesting to you.