If you’re a gamer and Star Wars fan, you’ve more than likely heard of LucasArts, the videogame developer side of Lucasfilm. Most of us associate LucasArts with the point-and-click adventure game craze of the 80’s and 90’s, when the company wasn’t just milking the Star Wars franchise for all it was forth. And for a time, it was good. But then adventure games sort of just stopped, their market value having fallen once full 3D and the Quake era had begun. LucasArts decided to make Star Wars games instead, which has obviously payed off despite some quality issues on certain games.

So imagine my jubilations when I saw an interview with LucasArts president Darrel Rodriguez on GTTV, who promised to bring LucasArts back to their old style of game developing. Star Wars was still their bread and butter, obviously, but he wanted the company to branch out and bring more quality games onto the market. The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition had just been released on Steam and Xbox Live Arcade, and more LucasArts adventure games was coming to Steam. LucasArts shut down for a week in order to generate new ideas and concepts. One of these concepts was Lucidity, which they decided to make into a full game.

Lucidity tells the story of a young girl named Sofi, who’s living with her grandmother. One day, her grandmother disappears, practically out of thin air and Sofi decides to go looking for her, wandering through various dreamscapes, seemingly conjured from her subconciousness. It’s up to the player to guide Sofi through the various levels in order to find her grandmother again.

In order to get Sofi through the levels, the player cycles through a number of items like platforms, trampolines and slingshots and places them in front of Sofi. Her interraction with the items is purely automatic, she merely wanders innocently forward expecting the player to help her out. And this would be easy if it wasn’t for the fact that the controls are downright frustratingly broken.

Item placement is based around a grid like system, so moving the cursor around the level comes off as a choppy and slow, making it almost impossible to place items below Sofi whenever she falls off a platform. Which she will. A lot!

There’s also a problem with cycling through the various objects you might need. Like in Tetris, it’s all randomised, so you often feel like you have no level of control over what happens next. Sometimes you get a vast number of useful items, at other times you’ll die instantly because you didn’t have the proper item in order to get across an instant-death pit. And this makes Lucidity a frustrating clusterfuck at times.

However, Lucidity is quite a beautiful game to look at and does stand out among most Xbox Live Arcade games. The art style is reminiscent of a Salvador Dali painting, and the backgrounds have several layers to them, despite the inherent flatness. Seeing as the main character is a child, and most of the levels seem to take place in her dreams, this choice of art style comes off as a pretty good choice. It’ll inevitably be compared to Braid, which featured a watercolour art style, but is that really such a bad thing? In my opinion it’s great that a game is at least trying to stand out, instead of going for the usual “brown is real” of most games these days. The music also adds to the game’s dreamlike design, with a beautifully rendition of the Swedish lullaby “Byssan Lull” performed by singer Lisa Eriksson over the title screen. It’s quite effective and should awaken fond childhood memories for most Scandinavians, myself included.

The level design itself can come off as a bit confusing though, but since this game borrows so much from surrealism what else can you expect. As you go through the levels you can collect fireflies, which restores Sofi’s health and unlocks bonus levels every time you get to 100 flies. It does add some replay value, if collecting stuff and whoring achivements are your things. The fireflies are scattered all over each level and requires multiple playthroughs if you want to find all of them.

Lucidity also suffers from an incredibly slow pacing, but I’m guessing that’s the point. However the game does run out of steam at about the 15th level, which was when I started asking myself “How long is this thing?!” I wanted to see it through to the end, but the gameplay is just so annoying you just feel like rage quitting after suffering from your 10th cheap death at the hands of some monster or pit trap.

I would say give it a go, if only to experience one of the artsiest games out there today, but I should warn you that the gameplay will leave you with a sour taste in your mouth.

– 6 / 10