Lucius – Review
Lucius is a new horror adventure puzzle game and the first game by Finnish developer Shiver Games. The game tries to bring an interesting twist to the horror game genre by trying to let you be the bad guy, but what is an interesting concept on paper is held back by some clunky controls and very annoying bugs in the end.
Story
The story is about the boy Lucius, a boy born on the 6th of June 1966, who lives in Dante Manor with his parents and their servants. On the night of his 8th birthday, Lucius is visited by the devil, who turns out to be his real father. Lucifer then goes on to order Lucius to kill everyone in his household as a sacrifice to his father and to make his own latent powers appear. The story of Lucius is not the most original one, but it’s not a bad one because of that. Be warned, though, that you’re going to be getting most of that story in the form of cut scenes to the point where, at times through the game, you’ll be spending at least as much time watching cut scenes as you will be actually playing the game. The story is divided into 18 chapters, which took us about a good 12 hours to finish, which felt like more than enough.
Graphics
Graphically, Lucius isn’t going to make any jaws drop. The character models in the game look pretty good even on the low setting but environments and objects often have much lower quality textures, especially when you get up close and have a good look at them, which is going to happen quite often when you’re looking through the house looking for useful items for your next murder. The game also had some serious frame rate issues overall, even with a gaming rig above the recommended settings that the developer has listed on their website. We also had some pretty bad clipping issues where characters would sometimes just drop halfway through the floor for a few seconds. So all in all, Lucius isn’t the worst game we’ve seen recently, but some annoying graphic problems cost it some serious points.
Sound
This is where Lucius shines. The music and sound effects in this game are just great. The music creates a great atmosphere throughout the entire game and offers some great variety fitting to each scene. Most of all, it managed to create a constant sense of tension and managed to make us feel a little bit uneasy, in a good way, the whole time, while the game isn’t really that scary most of the time, especially since you’re the one playing the bad guy. The same thing goes for the sound effects; all the sounds were very life-like and good quality, and small details like different sounds for the same object dropping on different surfaces made us really appreciate the effort put into it. Lastly, there’s the voice acting, which is without any problems and is on par with some of the bigger titles out there, which is that much more impressive since bad voice acting is something indie games like this typically struggle with pretty badly. Then again, since almost all of the story is told in cutscenes, we can understand the amount of effort put into it.
Gameplay
Lucius is a puzzle-based game, and for the most part, those puzzles are pretty well thought out. The game does kinda throw you in the deep after your first two murders, but usually, you can find at least one or two hints on how it wants you to kill your next victim after some searching. You can also unlock extra items by doing chores your mother gives you, and these go from cleaning up your room to taking out the trash or getting a bottle of wine from the cellar. The incentive for doing these chores are items you can unlock, which will make the game a bit easier for you. There is, for example, a tricycle that lets you move around the house much faster.
As good as that all sounds, though, we had one problem with Lucius: the actual act of playing it was just not fun. Controlling Lucius was a real pain at times; the controls just felt really sluggish, and we kept running into things or getting stuck behind things because of it. This might have been caused by the frame rate issues, but no matter what the cause was, it was just bad. Then there’s the powers: throughout the game, you unlock a few powers you can use, going from telekinesis to erasing someone’s mind. The problem with these powers is their usage. The telekinesis power was the worst just because we found it nearly impossible to accurately control objects while using it, making us either not use it or absolutely hate the times we needed it for certain segments. The rest of the powers didn’t really suffer from control problems but from an entirely different problem: the way you had to use them. Lucius has some pretty cool powers, but the way you use them to solve puzzles or commit your murders is just very predictable and feels like a major lost opportunity to do something neat or original.
The last major problem Lucius has is its AI. We lost track of the number of times we had to restart a certain part of the game because the AI bugged out on us. One perfect example was a puzzle where we had to hide in a closet and have an AI character open a door for us. We had to restart this specific part at least seven or eight times because the AI just kept getting stuck running into a wall instead of coming to open the door. If that had been the only instance of something like that happen we could have forgiven Lucius or attributed it to bad luck, but sadly, it happened several times, and that sort of thing is just game-breaking and unacceptable in a retail release.
Conclusion
So what’s the conclusion? On paper, Lucius sounds like a really fun and interesting horror puzzle game. The game has a good story, strong sound design, and great music driving it. It’s not the most amazing game, graphically, but if that were the only problem, we would still recommend this game without any problem. Sadly, the control problems and bugs are so bad that we just cannot advise anyone to buy this game in its current state unless you are a big fan of this genre, and even then, we’re sure there are better alternatives out there for you. We really hope developer Shiver Games can patch out all the issues, or otherwise, this will be another example of a game with a lot of potential failing because of sloppy execution.
Lucius - Review,
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