Content warning: Suicide is mentioned in this review and in the game.
Playing Lucah is like being swept across a dark river. Although hacking games are widely used, it always drags you out of such tags into a more vivid, tortured and smooth game. There may be a solid ground under your feet, but the world seems unfinished. For a short time, its lines are twisting on a plane that is pure black, as if not happy on its skin. You wander for a while in the fierce bursts of trees and the graffiti of barbed wire, looking for door keys or checkpoints. You fight some swords and Zhang's ghosts, tearing their guts with jagged words of power. Then you will find something-a person, a cliff, a strange tangled light-and the water shuts off overhead. The solid flickers, and then you are tortured by a lot of memory, suddenly bursting out in the bald white type.
The sound of the letters is different. Sometimes they squeak like fingers on glass. Sometimes they slap like gunfire. Between passages, you will catch a glimpse of seabirds, the dead sun and screaming faces, and the afterimages gliding from the darkness. These memories, written in the first or second person, can only be loosely associated with the character and cannot be well integrated into the plot. Colin Horgan, the creator of the game, has a foundation in the upbringing and emotional distress of Roman Catholicism.
The status of Lucah's memoirs and "mood fragments", like borrowing from Christian scriptures and games like Bayonetta, is sour. It breaks everything down into things you've never seen before. Sometimes this is a visual novel that shows the uselessness of the player and only gives you the dialog option to make all the saved content gray. Elsewhere, it squeezed out and used design fixtures, offering its own 2015 prototype game in a game called "I'm Not a Machine," as an arcade game. In a way, it's a piece of music: areas are marked as "tracks" and divided into "verses," and your customizable fighting style is called a "spell." In the process of this transformation, Lucah rescued the abused term "immersion" from mediocrity. In a sense, it is "immersive" because it rejects the distance you need to clearly delineate its form over many lengths. It does not treat its mystery as a problem of lore, but delves into the psychological potential of video games as a black box and responds to user input, but it is unknowable and not very predictable.
Lucah may not be your classic A-to-B mission, but it does start somewhere. The protagonist of the game is a cursed soul, who fights against an overly described nightmare of a certain religious country and itself, and fights with it in some capacity. After a (maybe?) Invincible battle with a powerful pioneer creature, you wake up on the shore of a forest. Like Virgil greets Dante, the white ghost greets you and invites you to find your way to the center of the field. The ensuing landscape slipped from the cathedral and caves to the decline of the modern city. You will visit a subway station reminiscent of Silent Hill 4, and a pier, where the illusions spin like no one in the wilderness. No matter where you go, you can find other defeated travellers, fall on the wall, dream of non-existence, or with a fading feeling. Wherever you go, there will be fire, blood and silence behind you.