Format: 360, PC
Release: Out now
Developer: LucasArts
Publisher: LucasArts

"When I play with my toys it helps me escape the things I don’t want to think about."

Where would an indie game be without a weighty metaphor from which to hang? Not that the LucasArts-published Lucidity could strictly be classified as indie, although its Etsy-felted visuals and Scandinavian nursery rhyme soundtrack may suggest otherwise. Still, this is a game pregnant with symbolism, a platformer that chooses to tackle videogame tropes of lives and death in a wholly unvideogame-like fashion: through the eyes of a little girl mourning her deceased grandmother.

The metaphorical and literal tasks in the game are at least carefully synchronous. Sofi’s mind, identity and memories are submerged in a sludge of grief that it’s your task to get her through. Each stage you complete takes her one step further into and ultimately through her bereavement, neither racing nor lingering in the heartache, but rather trudging, best foot forward, through its sinuous pathways.

In interactive terms too, your job here is to act as Sofi’s guardian angel, catching her from the traps, pitfalls and monsters that wait before her. This is performed via a slot machine procession of objects which you place into the level as she inexorably walks across the screen, Lemming-like, from left to right. Fail to break a nasty fall on to some spikes with a spring, a block of wood or staircase and Sofi will be sent back to the start of the level – and forced to relive that part of the grieving process all over again.

While the toolbox from which you pluck your equipment is broad, its palette is tight, ensuring that, while each object is random, you’re rarely left without a feasible option. A desktop fan may send Sofi soaring upwards towards the top of screen while a catapult propels her across it, but both can be used to prevent her from landing on a monster.

To weight her fate slightly more in your favour, you also have a hold slot, into which you can place an object as a reserve piece, granting some strategy in the random procession. Nevertheless, despite the Braid-like ambiance, this is a game that emphasises reactions and improvisation over dry, single fit solutions. Often, you’ll be placing random objects in a frenzied conga-line across the screen, desperately trying to keep Sofi afloat long enough to deliver her across a chasm before your assault course fades away and she tumbles into oblivion. That the game often devolves into a tussle between reaction and luck means that the lack of checkpoints midway through levels can sting.

That said, Lucidity is more than a mere scramble for survival. Each of the game’s stages is filled with fireflies which Sofi can collect in order to unlock new and bonus stages. This simple mechanic does more than add longevity. It also encourages repeat and more tactically considered play of stages. While the fireflies are positioned to act as a light trail, picking out routes over and under obstacles, they also reveal diverging paths, ensuring that, in all but the earliest stages, not all fireflies can be captured in a single playthrough.

The storytelling is light and never overbearing, easily glossed over in the detail if you wish to ignore it, even if its rhythm and timbre is inescapable in the general ambiance. As with Braid before it, Lucidity is a self-contained creation, with neither setup obvious scope for a sequel. As a result, it refreshes with its purity of purpose and ambition, even if, as a mechanising of the grieving process, it’s a game few will wish to return to once completed. After all, as Sofi herself points out, when we play it’s usually to escape the things that we don't want to think about, not solve them. [7]