Lucid (Caliban’s Revenge)
Played on: 3rd October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera browser
How long I spent: 45 minutes to reach one ending
Content warning: Lucid has cancer and death as central themes, and this review discusses those themes.
Lucid is a 30-40 minute Harlowe Twine game. It’s one of those games where part of the experience is working out what’s going on, but it begins with the player character escaping the rising darkness in a train station, and continues with them exploring a strange and nightmarish city.
This work is thick with atmosphere and poetry. Lucid’s world is clearly a dream-world, painted in blacks and blacker blacks, and the setting is very rich. It doesn’t go wild with dream imagery, but rather holds back just enough that the weird parts become all the more unsettling. It’s a very visual work for one which is solely text without multimedia. This is a game world that’s very compelling just to explore.
Although the setting is fantastic, not all the game’s moment-to-moment writing quite works for me. It occasionally strays on the wrong side of overwrought, like when it describes cereal boxes as “uniform masks of anarchy adorning the face of every packet,” and a couple of unfortunate typos interrupt the atmosphere. More often, though, the writing is exactly the right amount of wrought, as in the description of the housing estate “open[ing] to accept / You as if it was a mother that / Never had any other choice.” (It’s worth running into traffic early on, an apparently silly choice which gives a surprisingly haunting response.) The text is complemented here and there by some fabulous use of Twine effects and features. For example, the choice links getting terser and more breathless during a long climb is very very clever.
The theme of Lucid is played close to its chest for a while, but since it’s named in the content warning of the game (and this review) I’ll just go and say it: it’s an allegory for cancer. It’s said explicitly at one point in-game. Lucid is a dream-world full of symbolism, and as we explore it we start to build a picture of someone coming to terms with a deadly disease. The way this unwinds is well controlled, and gives the player a lot to think about long after the game is over.
A lot of this allegory comes in the late game, and I’d like to discuss it. It’s probably better to experience it than to read me writing about it, though, so I’ll put the spoilery stuff behind this details tag:
Endgame spoilers
More specifically, Lucid is about dying from cancer, and the choice between chemotherapy and acceptance of death. The way chemotherapy is portrayed in this game is as a poison; it destroys your quality of life, and then you die anyway. This struck me as very morbid and nihilist when I was playing, but it makes more sense when you frame Lucid as being about terminal cancer specifically. In that sense, I suppose chemotherapy really does seem pointless.
I’m having a bit of trouble fitting the salamander into it, though, to be honest. It’s pretty clearly a representation of a malignant tumour, as something white which grows and consumes you. In the late game, you’re expected to make a sacrifice to enter the finale of the game, which means killing the salamander with a cutlass, which must be a metaphor for surgical intervention, right? But then the “true” ending of the game is to let the darkness consume you in that final area, which I think is about learning not to fear death, and choosing that over destructive chemotherapy. So you go under the knife for a tumour, and then choose to die anyway? Is it much of a sacrifice to lose a tumour? I thought a sacrifice was something you didn’t want to give up. And then there’s the part about childhood demons in the school which, although it fits the setting well, doesn’t seem to belong with the rest of the metaphor. I expect this is all extremely frustrating for the author to read – I feel sure I’ve got the wrong end of the stick somewhere – but I’m having trouble putting the parts of the allegory together into a coherent whole.
As well as being exploratory, Lucid is also part puzzlebox. It’s not so difficult as a puzzle game, and I got lucky and stumbled through the right choices before realising why I was doing what I was doing. There’s some thoughtful design here, though, once you put yourself in puzzle-solving mode. For example, at one stage you’re on a timer, but this timer is reset whenever you start doing something that shouldn’t be interrupted (e.g. talking to another character). And even though it’s possible to die, some events persist between lives, so that you don’t need to play the whole thing in one perfect run. Between the writing effects and this smart programming, Lucid makes some very well-considered design choices which I appreciated a lot.
Another good game for the pile! Lucid is a rich and evocative game to explore, and if you’ve dodged the spoilers above and skipped to the end, it’s well worth experiencing.