Lucid by Caliban’s Revenge
Lucid is a game about death. Not dealing death to others, as so many games are, nor escaping it, as are so many others; but facing death with something approaching acceptance. As we take our protagonist through a night-time city filled with heavy symbolism, we slowly come to realise that the game is more than just running into dead ends and dying. There are various actions to perform which will in the end allow us to enter the house where we can choose between darkness and light. Don’t be fooled by its reputation: it was always the light that hurt and devoured us. It was always the darkness that was ready to soothe with the balm of forgetfulness.
I would almost have missed the more impactful parts of the game. There are frequent deaths, and they bring you back to the beginning, which misled me into believing that I could explore part of the game on my computer, then part on my phone as I was cooking dinner, and then a bit more on my by now restarted computer. But there actually are states that persist through death, and the switch between devices nearly obscured this to me. It was only by reading other reviews that I realised I should explore more. Possibly it is useful to hint at the structure of the game somewhat more strongly when a new loop begins.
As a whole the game is impactful. The prose poetry is rather uneven in quality, but at its best it is very good, oppressive and evocative at the same time. Sometimes the author surprises with a nice turn of phrase, as when water in the gutters of a downhill street is described as: “Recent rains guttering down the decline.” Sometimes there is a perfectly executed little couplet:
That is just beautiful. Another highlight are the sentences that describe your relation to the shopkeeper just after you’ve found a gun in his pack of cereal:
Unexpected, understated, and exactly right. Combined with a few memorable set pieces – the climbing of the stairs, the scene with the witch and the salamanders – and the effective passages with which the game closes, there was enough quality here to sustain my attention for the duration of the trip and to leave me satisfied at the end.
However, I called the quality uneven. This is true about the game world (the school scene seemed rather perfunctory to me) but even more about the style. There are frequent typos, which is a shame. More importantly, there are many instances where the author’s phrases ‘sound’ poetic if you don’t pay too much attention to them, but collapse when you do. Here is one early offender:
What is ‘brush stroke clean’ supposed to be? Clean? Not clean? What are the ‘edges’ of the station? And how does grime ‘describe’ them? The longer I think about the sentence, the less the words seem to belong together.
At other times, the author’s attempts to evoke images just don’t work for me. For instance:
I have not the faintest idea what ‘the colour of medicine’ is supposed to be. Clicking the link in this phrase then tells us about lettering ‘the colour of trains’. I don’t know. Trains in the Netherlands are yellow and blue, except the slower ones that are white and blue; and in other countries they have all kinds of other colours. I’m left wondering what trains the author has in mind, which can’t have been the aim of introducing the image!
The biggest offender, though, is the frequent use of simile. There are many passages in which one thing is described as being ‘like’ another thing. This is something to watch out for when writing poetry, because similes ‘feel’ poetic, but are easy to overuse and hard to do right. Some of the ones in Lucid are done right, but many are more confusing than evocative. Here is an early example:
There are two massive ambiguities in this sentence. First, the grammar seems to suggest that I tear through the pamphlet in the same way that a bad love letter would tear through a pamphlet. This is presumably not how we have to read it. Second, when talking about reading material, ‘to tear through’ usually means ‘to read very quickly’. But that is probably not what is meant here either; we probably have to understand it as a physical act of tearing up the piece of paper. Even with those ambiguities resolved, the image remains deeply unclear. How does one tear up a bad love letter? Quickly? In disgust? In exasperation? (At the bad writing of our lover? Or at our own bad writing?) I have no idea. If the author had a clear idea to convey to me, they failed.
Here is a sample of some other similes that left me similarly bewildered:
(I note in passing that I can understand how balconies would be like the ribs of a human skeleton, which are horizontal, but that it just puzzles me how they could be like the ribs of a cetacean skeleton, which are vertical… as balconies presumably are not.)
Looking over the piece as a whole, I think there’s a lot of talent on display, but there also needs to be some further rigorous, even ruthless editing. That could take the work to a different level. And then, perhaps, I can really start wondering whether it’s better to go gentle into that good night, or rage against the dying of the light.