Lucah: Born of a Dream is a difficult game to describe, with its story being even more formless, disconnected, and dreamlike than one might even expect. Its mechanics likewise take some getting used to, the combat existing as a take on the souls-like genre that places an emphasis on performing precisely timed parries rather than dodging. If it’s not obvious yet, I wasn’t exactly enthused by Lucah during my first playthrough, with little discoveries such as pathways unexpectedly being one-way only and a percentage meter counting up to an uncertain fate consistently irking me by undermining my preferred play style. Still, I continued playing, initially to discover if new game + mode made any more sense (which it does, comparatively), and eventually because I had acclimated to Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s abundant strangeness and begun to appreciate how natural its underlying mechanics felt. Even the storytelling, which at first blush struck me as being pretentious due to its proclivity for obscuring just enough information to leave you perpetually scratching your head, eventually grew on me as I started to piece together a theory based on the many seemingly disconnected stories. This won’t be a game for everybody, but even those who lack the requisite experiences to make a personal connection to the underlying themes and internal character dialogue will be able to respect Lucah: Born of a Dream given an adjustment period. Not everyone has the patience for that, admittedly, but it’s well worth the effort to enjoy something this unapologetically personal and unique.

[Note: Something Lucah deserves credit for is the front-and-center warning about its flashing images. It’s hard to overstate how rare such a warning is. The embedded videos don’t contain a huge amount of flashing, but consider this a warning for those who’d prefer to err on the side of caution.]

In Lucah: Born of a Dream, people are sometimes becoming other people

The very first thing you have to let go of to begin understanding Lucah is the idea that a person is a single person. Here, you’ll be called by multiple names and all of them ring slightly differently, as you’re simultaneously those characters and not those characters. Picturing each character as a lump of clay instead helps immeasurably, with multiple individual pieces being capable of mashing into each other until it’s not clear where one ends and the other begins, as that’s not entirely unlike how entities are treated here. Characters having multiple names complicates the storytelling, of course, and I never did find enough information to figure out exactly where Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s eponymous dream originated. There are several possibilities, but they weave in and out of one another while sharing godlike characters and lacking dates. When anything can happen for any reason, it’s no longer possible to use causality to sort everything out. Imagine drifting in and out of sleep while watching Memento or only reading every fifteenth page in a novel out of order and you’ll have an idea of what the story feels like; you can draw a basic picture of what’s happening, but importance nuances have to be filled in with your own interpretations that may or may not be true to the underlying intent.

Lucah: Born of a Dream is abstract to a fault, with back story often—but not always—being delivered through visual novel-like sequences of text that frequently quiver with the mood of the character in question. Everyone’s point of view is riddled with insecurities and uncertainties, each scene viewed through the prism of their moment-to-moment vulnerabilities and described more in terms of how the interpersonal dynamics feel than divorced from the emotion of the circumstances.

The back story is frenetic and easy to become lost in, with some lines only appearing for a split-second before the screen automatically advances (whereas most of the time you’re manually pressing B to move things along). Pictures also appear for a split-second and always disappear automatically. Drawn in the game’s wild, scratched style of pixel art, it’s not always immediately apparent what you’re seeing at a glance, reinforcing the underlying impression that you’re witnessing events more through a fog of emotion than as an objective and impartial observer. There are even a couple of points where you read notes directly from a developer (or maybe a character with the same name as a developer—again, characters are mounds of clay who could be anyone or everyone), complete with a signature at the very end. It all comes across as deeply personal, almost to the point where it becomes impenetrable for anyone who hasn’t shared the same experiences.

As someone who’s clearly standing on the outside looking in through foggy windows, Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s writing is uncomfortably bizarre and scattershot, but also so undeniably sincere that it’s hard to consider any of that a negative, even if I do wish that it was slightly more accessible.

There are tools here to customize your Lucah: Born of a Dream gameplay

You’ll find the traditional health and stamina bars that are par for the course in souls-like games, of course, and they’re joined by the “charge” bar that’s filled by successful attacks and expended when activating your familiar (equippable pet/guns with different firing properties, basically) with the Y button. You can perform a light attack with X and a heavy attack with A, but the range and damage of those light and heavy attacks varies based on the specific attacks you have equipped; as you explore Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s world, you’ll occasionally stumble upon “mantras,” which are new attacks that can be equipped into your “paradigms,” or sets of light/heavy/familiar attacks. Different attacks can lend themselves to vastly different gameplay approaches, as the cautious will want something with long range that allows them to keep their distance, while I went big into the high-power, low-range Thanatos mantra and fought enemies up close and personal. You have two paradigm slots that you can adjust whenever you’re outside of combat, and these two sets can then be freely swapped between inside of combat with ZL for even more flexibility.

That’s barely scratching the surface of Lucah‘s play style customization, too. “Virtues” are easily one of the most impactful systems, being equippable perks that you have to find or earn like mantras and familiars. Each costs a certain number of VP, and you can purchase items that increase your maximum. Your max VP might also go up over time, but I wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention to this particular mechanic early on and usually had enough free space to equip new virtues. These perks aren’t tiny improvements, either, with one allowing you to survive a deathblow once per fight. Another made it possible to regain lost health by attacking foes, bringing the gameplay in line with that in Bloodborne.

For all the freedom you’re afforded in play style, however, Lucah: Born of a Dream has a clear preference when it comes to how you deal with enemies. It relies on a “break” system that sees enemies becoming stunned and prone to massive damage once you’ve dealt enough damage, with considerations such as interrupting their attack with one of your own and the specific mantra you’re using all coming into play to make breaking generally reliable, but not entirely predictable; late-game enemies often require a barrage of so many attacks before breaking that you’ll be low on stamina by the time they’re vulnerable. There’s a second way of breaking them, however, and that’s to parry the attack by dodging in their direction right after the golden flash that acts as a pre-attack cue. Different enemy types/attacks require different parry timing, and while dodging too early usually sees you avoiding damage thanks to invincibility frames, dodging too late can see you eating several unnecessary blows.

The risk/reward of the parry system is truly enjoyable. Your normal attack often allows you to minimize risk while only doing a few hundred points of damage, whereas breaking enemies allows you to do a few thousand. The parry breaks appear to leave foes even more vulnerable than during a normal break, too, so I’ve wiped out a third of boss health bars with careful parrying and counterattacking. All of these mechanics weave in and out of one another; any foes you hit while attacking a parried enemy are likely to break in one or two blows, so when I equipped myself to do damage all around my character, it became possible to parry a single enemy and then take out an entire group in a matter of seconds. There’s nothing quite as enjoyable as being handed empowering mechanics and knowing that nothing’s stopping you from finding game-breakingly overpowered combinations. And even if you haven’t found anything like that, Lucah: Born of a Dream features inbuilt cheats that you can activate without any repercussions, allowing those who are unaccustomed to such games to play without impacting the difficulty for everyone else.

Leveling up is really only a thing on your first run, unless you respec

Defeating enemies earns you experience, naturally, and you can use that experience to purchase stat upgrades at the gravestones that act as Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s bonfire equivalent/autosave screens. This is yet another area where you’re afforded a great deal of flexibility, as you can level up your strength, health, stamina, stamina recovery rate, charge, and how much charge is earned from attacks. Virtues can also be selected from the randomized pool of 4 level-up options, and all of this allows you to build your character out in a specific way while the randomization keeps you from prioritizing one stat to the exclusion of all else. Leveling up isn’t really a factor outside of your first playthrough, as you quickly reach the maximum level, but you can also use experience as currency to purchase things from Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s roving shopkeeper, including abilities to level down and reshuffle the pool of level-up options. This works unexpectedly well, teaching you the value of the various upgrades early before handing you the tools to rework your build and min/max based on which stats are most important to your play style.

The corruption percentage is effectively a timer, but don’t panic quite yet

At the top-right portion of the screen is a percentage number that slowly ticks upward .01% at a time, and that’s your corruption meter. The longer you dilly-dally (and the more you die), the higher it goes, rendering it a kind of timer. It’s not immediately clear what this is counting up to, but suffice it to say that allowing it to hit 100% triggers the bad ending once you reach the next screen transition. Of course, calling it a “bad” ending might be a stretch, as each of Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s three endings earns you new tools that can help you during your next playthrough. Whether you receive the neutral or bad ending on your first playthrough (the “true” ending is only available in NG+), however, this is where Lucah really starts to shine; loading your save after this point triggers NG+ mode, and there’s far more story content to be found during additional runs.

Your corruption meter ticks upward noticeably faster in NG+, to the point where racing to the end isn’t an option. Instead, your combat encounters are ranked, and the meter is decreased based on the score that you receive. Obtaining a B-rank reduces corruption by .50%, an A-rank reduces it by %1.50, and an S-rank reduces it by %3.00, so you’re suddenly incentivized to master combat. That’s not the only trick to help you beat the timer, though, as an ability is unlocked that allows you to replay chapters. If you entered chapter 6 with a ridiculously high corruption meter, for example, you can skip back to chapter 4 or 5 (complete with whatever your meter was at when that chapter began) from any checkpoint and take measures to enter chapter 6 with it more under control.

There’s a second and arguably more important reason to try and enter each new chapter with a low corruption, and that’s for the sake of completionism/exploration. Put simply, you can replay any chapters you’ve beaten in NG+, even on additional playthroughs. If you’re missing something in chapter 8 and just started your third run, you can walk up to the first save point and skip all the way there. In effect, you create a fast travel system that you can use without penalty. And since you can skip back to a different chapter after obtaining a missed item and inherit whatever your saved corruption level for that chapter is (which, as a sidenote, can be overwritten with lower corruption values), the time limit suddenly has no sway over you. Where you were once held captive by that number ticking higher, it becomes possible to explore with impunity, by that point intimately familiar with the bizarre ways that areas function. There’s a time limit, but it ticks up slowly in your first playthrough, can be lowered in your second, and becomes irrelevant in all subsequent runs. I went from hating this system to loving it.

The performance on the Nintendo Switch is just about perfect

For the most part, Lucah: Born of a Dream maintains a solid 51-60 FPS, even during its most chaotic moments. In fact, most of the time it tends to land between 57-60, and the drops are largely obscured by the game’s intentional “player feedback” pauses that make it easier to tell when you’ve been damaged, when an enemy enters their break state, and when you’re doing huge damage to an enemy in said state. The boss fight against the final boss of the “true” path averages between 40-50 FPS, however, with this being the only such outlier that I noticed/measured. Outside of that, I suffered a single game crash, again during that same boss fight. I wasn’t recording when it happened, but I suspect that I damaged my opponent right as it entered the second stage of the fight. Considering that I’ve spent something like 15-20 hours wandering around, gleefully parrying attacks and generally acting like a demigod of pain without encountering any other issues, I’m willing to chalk that up as a one-off fluke.

Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s visuals and music are trippy, dark, and great

The design of the player character (canonically Lucah, though you provide a name at the start that’s used instead) serves as a handy way of explaining the underlying personality of the art in general: a scrawled pixel art figure with adorable cat ears and a color scheme that changes based on which paradigm/mantra is currently active. The visuals occupy a middle ground between artistic and utilitarian, the minimalism making attack cues much easier to see than you’d expect from watching video of Lucah: Born of a Dream, while the colorful lines evoke Earthbound‘s Moonside area, with a jot of free-handed whimsy added in that’s finally filtered through a bunch of Rorschach ink blots until everything looks like a playground for demons. It works on a bunch of different levels, and I adore the art in this game. Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s soundtrack also has its moments of excellence, with the high-energy electronic boss fight themes standing out. Multi-stage bosses are a particular treat, with some fights receiving additional instrumentation every time you make it to the next part of the fight. It’s not always a seamless transition, but that just makes it easier to appreciate what sounds like a crossfade between the different tracks. Crossfades are always an interesting soundtrack choice. Lucah‘s soundtrack takes too long to get going, though, with a lot of the noisy, atmospheric tracks playing early in the game, and the truly amazing ones only showing up at the end and during additional playthroughs. Much of this boils down to my personal distaste for screechy atmospheric background music, honestly, but it makes me sad to think that some people will stop playing before hearing some of Lucah‘s best songs.

Story: 1.5/3 Gameplay: 3/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ – 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Lucah: Born of a Dream Review Screenshots

*A Nintendo Switch key was provided for the purpose of this Lucah: Born of a Dream review

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