Lucah: Born of a Dream is a game I played last year for my personal site and it was one of my favorite games of 2018. Now, I return to the game to take a look at its’ Nintendo Switch port that is out today. Going back to look at things you’ve played before is a mixed bag. On the one hand, you no longer have the view of a newcomer, so you can’t gauge how accessible something is to newcomers of the game and genre. However, it also means that you can be more discerning and catch stuff you might have missed.

Lucah: Born of a Dream follows the journey of Lucah, a marked child cursed to have their inner demons manifest as actual demons. They are but one of many crossing a land of dreams, in search of salvation from their past.

As an action game, Lucah performs pretty well. Throughout the game you find Mantras and familiars (presumably dropped by fellow characters) that can be equipped into sets. Mantras differ in the amount of damage they deal, the range of their attacks, the finishers you can do with them as well as their unique special trait. You equip a primary and secondary mantra for hack and slash action, using up your stamina with your slices. Stamina is also used for dodging, so you have to be careful not to waste all of it going in on an enemy so you don’t get punished.

back at it #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/rZObqmuGSl

— Dari (@scitydreamer) June 24, 2019

Along with your stamina bar, there’s a charge bar that is built up by striking enemies. Your familiars use up the charge, typically doing ranged attacks. Normally you’d fire them alongside you or use their attacks as a finisher of sorts. There is a handy healing familiar, but on this playthrough where I’m more experienced, it comes off as less practical. Truthfully, you’ll be wanting some extra damage available when you’re out of stamina or when you’re dodging.

This is especially true if you break an enemy’s guard. Sometimes when attacking enemies (usually when they’re winding up for an attack), you break their guard, opening them up to take more damage. If you want to do some riskier plays, you can dodge toward an enemy while they’re attacking to parry them for the same effect. It is risky, but reliable and it’s something that’ll really incentivize you to learn enemy behavior.

Along with the mix of Mantras and familiars are Virtues, which are equippable perks that encourage you to adopt different playstyles. One that I’ve been using on this playthrough was a very handy one where doing a perfect dodge restores your stamina. This gives you the opportunity to immediately punish whoever swung at you. There is a limit to the number of Virtues you can equip, so they kinda give you a chance to think about possible character builds to accommodate them.

If you’re a newcomer to the genre or if you just want to play for the narrative and atmosphere, Lucah is generous to offer a bunch of accessibility options at no cost to you. At the beginning of the game, you can adjust the amount of damage enemies do and how much damage you take. In the game proper, you can equip Mods like giving yourself extra health or giving items unlimited uses. I’ll admit that when I first played the game, I ended up using them toward the end where it was too difficult for my novice skills to handle. I no longer needed those Mods on this Switch playthrough, but I understand that there’d be people that want them and I’m glad they’re in the game.

I had two issues with the game when I first played, and while the problems seem to be a bit better, they’re not entirely fixed. A problem I originally had with the rewinds, an item that lets you restart a phase of a fight; was that enemies could immediately attack you after use, sometimes negating the health you regained. I notice that enemies are stunned briefly after using a rewind, though sometimes enemies end up attacking anyway. Maybe it’s because of certain attack animations? I don’t know for sure. It’s an attempt at a fix, but it’s not entirely perfect.

Another issue is that the game uses auto targeting to make sure you’re swinging or shooting at the right person. Normally it works fine, but the first time I played, there were points where I was surrounded by enemies and I ended up swinging at different targets than the ones I intended; which can be a real pain in more dangerous encounters. It’s hard to judge if this has been resolved, because while this problem didn’t happen as much, I’m not sure whether or not it was addressed or if I was in less situations for it to happen.

It is also on this replay that I noticed another issue, particularly the fact that you don’t have mercy invincibility. Now, you can fight back against a bunch of enemies ganging up on you by attempting to parry, but when it comes to projectiles, you’re out of luck. Some of my deaths (a lot of deaths in the neutral final boss fight) were a result of me being swiss-cheesed from all sides or just getting hit by a rapid fire of bullets that was hard to dodge out of. While you can avert this by targeting the bullet spewing jerks, it still feels like a cheap way to die.

Lucah: Born of a Dream is portrayed in a unique art style where instead of getting clean pixel art, you have chaotic, messy pixel drawings. As I said in my first review, it gives this sense of decay to the world that fits in line with the general mood. Everything in the game is animated in some way, from your idle animations, to the pulsating lines of the environment, to your own health bar flickering. It’s a simple art style, but it is an evocative and expressive one. It is especially apparent in combat, with strikes creating sweeping lines across the screen, cameras focusing dramatically on enemy kills, and the game slowing down on perfect dodges to accentuate the action. However, I do still think the cutscene art is pretty weak; looking at it now, this is probably a consequence of writing being the focus of the cutscenes and not the art, which ends up making the art too simple.

Also defining the game’s atmosphere is the game’s soundtrack. The music lends an oppressive mood to the game that never quite goes away. Areas have different mixes of their theme, starting with atmospheric hums to something with a heavier beat as you get deeper in the area. Coming off of NieR, which does similar stuff with its soundtrack, I now have a greater appreciation for the game’s sound design.

One of the main reasons why I wanted to replay Lucah was that I wanted to get a better sense of the game’s story. Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s story is one that’s open to interpretation. It’s hard to tell if characters represent themselves or if they represent figments of each other; Lucah could be a figment of a character introduced in new game plus, that character could be an extension of them, or they could both be separate people. I’ve actually come up with some theories on the setting and some of the characters on this playthrough, but they’re huge spoilers.

Part of why they’re huge spoilers is because my theories are reliant on the new game plus mode. Among gameplay changes (detailed later), new game plus adds some more plot bits that help re-contextualize the story and show different perspectives. Does it make the story easier to understand? Well, kinda. If anything, new game plus provides a guiding hand rather than spelling things out outright. People that prefer straightforward stories won’t be into it, but people that like ambiguity and theorizing could get a kick out of ti.

What’s clearer are the themes of the game, which is a quest to forgive oneself of traumas. The nightmares are manifestations of traumas that you beat up throughout the game, the struggle to cope becoming an actual struggle. You run into other NPCs that have tried to walk the same path as Lucah but often find themselves falling into despair; becoming monsters themselves. Your rival, Christian, was a kid much like Lucah that tried to find redemption through the church. Sadly, their appearance seemingly brought damnation onto him, forcing him to go on the same pilgrimage as Lucah.

Speaking of which, another major element is Lucah‘s approach toward religion, which is basically Nightmare Catholicism. The quest for forgiveness is tied into a concept I learned about since I last played called redemptive suffering: the belief that suffering reduces the penalty of sin. Religious NPCs commit flagellation for the sake of redemption, a church official puts cursed children like Lucah into a gauntlet to spill blood and have their blood spilled as penance for their sins, etc. Personally, I believe that a large part of Lucah‘s conflict is that its characters are caught up in this religious system believing that it can help them cope with problems, while failing to recognize that the concept of redemptive suffering contributes to their problems.

The theme of suffering and forgiveness leads us into Lucah: Born of a Dream‘s last major mechanic, the corruption meter. As traumas manifest, they eat Lucah up and their stress continually builds in a meter in the corner. Every time you die, (much like how you’d be frustrated,) Lucah gets frustrated and hopeless, with their corruption jumping up a bunch. The game does give you mercy in that it’ll lower the meter a bit if it gets full, but you do get the bad ending if Lucah gets fully corrupt again.

Fighting back against the corruption becomes harder on new game plus. The rate at which it grows is faster and while you do carry over your arsenal, enemies just seem to be ruder. However, you are now ranked on fights and getting good ranks through fighting quickly and maintaining a combo reduces corruption. This new path to the good ending is an attrition, but much like real life, facing your inner demons and coming to love yourself is a challenge that can be overcome.

As a Switch port, I think it’s pretty faithful to the original version. I did not run into any issues and it emulates the original pretty fine. Along with the Switch’s portability, I would say that this is the ideal version of Lucah: Born of a Dream and picking it up is something I wholeheartedly recommend.

A Nintendo Switch review Copy of Lucah: Born of a Dream was provided by Syndicate Atomic for this review.

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Lucah: Born of a Dream

$14.99

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Tight, satisfying combat.
• Depressing and oppressive atmosphere
• Unique art style and great soundtrack

Cons

• Some parts of combat need a bit more polish
• If you want a straightforward story, you won't find it here.