Lucius is one of the many sons of Satan. In his first adventure he discovers his powers and uses it to kill his family and servants. In his second tale he murders anybody indiscriminately. The boy is pure evil and you, as the player, has to be evil with him.Let’s start with a title explanation: ‘Lucius 1 and 2 – a (somewhat) game review.’
Both the Lucius games are so riddled with errors and mistakes that you can hardly call it a game. Character’s that won’t die, items that float in the air or sudden disappearances from your inventory. Half of both the games is trying to find a way around the silly errors the games throw at you.
But, having said that, the game that remains is simply far too (wickedly) delicious not to like!
The best way I can describe it is by comparing it to Peter Molyneux´s original idea for the Fable-franchise of games.
His idea was (as usual for him) far grander than could be achieved at the time. He wanted to create a game in which the choice of a good or bad path were much more difficult to achieve from the onset. A game wherein every death counts and that the children of the dead could come to hunt you.
What Fable ended up to be was a game in which the choice between bad and good were rather black and white. ‘Do you wish to help kidnappers or protect the family?’ The only moment in the game I (the player) was truly bad was when I sacrificed two murderous criminals to get a rather cool crossbow.
Don’t judges get a salary when they condemn a man?
Lucius, however, is different. In these games you are bad to the bone for the get go. It’s the ground the temple is build upon –if you will. So you play a bad guy (boy).
And in this sense it is far more honest than any other game wherein the hero mows down hundreds of adversaries and still remains good.
Like The Saboteur in which you can drive over numerous civilians and still remain the hero.
I prefer Second World War-games because of Nazi’s. Nazi’s were (and are) the scum of the earth so my conscious is far more comfortable with killing those (regardless of the children they leave behind or their backstory) than in any contemporary game in which my mind starts boggling about political agendas or cold-war outside influences.
In Lucius you play the anti-Christ; evil incarnate. And playing a game with such a mindset makes you care less about the personal life of each of the characters you kill.
Yet the games do like to play around with it. Each person you kill has somewhat of a back-story (written down in a short synopsis when your mouse hovers over the character).
This game forces you to accept the ‘dark side’ and just go with it. This makes ‘killing granny’ far more easier.
It does happen, though, throughout the games that you sometimes come across characters you do not wish to kill.
Babies for instances are still a ‘no-no’ (even the game programmers didn’t dare to touch upon this subject). And, halfway through the second game, I stumbled upon a gay couple having sex in a bathroom. I was so happy that the game-makers dared to include same-sex love I almost (almost) didn’t have the heart to kill them.
What makes Lucius such a nice game to play is mainly because of the brutality of it all. You (the player) constantly find yourself plotting an planning your next murder without getting caught. But you are also trying to solve riddles.
Here we have a guy walking to a phones every 30 seconds. Accept the darkness and go with it: “Now, what can I do with an electrical wire and a phone?”
It is a murder spree that let’s you get away with it without having to bother about consciousness or whether or not ‘I’ should do this.
The story around it is fun (especially if you like horror-movies) but unimportant. Each level brings you new ways to kill a person. In the end acid and poison are the ones you use when you don’t figure out the best way to kill a person.
So let’s tackle the two games one by one.
LUCIUS 1.What did I like about Lucius one?
For starters the person who planned the mansion needs a reward. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game in which each and every room was so perfectly placed.
I remember Resident Evil in which rooms popped up that were totally illogically placed in comparison to other rooms.
Did the original Resident Evil game have a kitchen?
Second the way ‘you kill’ is one way and one way only. This isn’t King’s Quest II in which you either kill the snake or throw a bridle on it. The point of the game is figuring out how to kill a certain person and getting away with it/remaining a good boy in the eyes of your parents.
So Lucius 1 is a bit of a morbid puzzle. I’ve got an absentminded teacher and a gun…what to do with them both?
Now you might hate killing your teacher (I did). But in the grand scheme of things it is the puzzle of actually killing him that takes the cake. Whether or not you like the person is a duality this game enjoys to toy around with. But in the end you are still evil and you have to make evil choices.
Heavily influenced by the movie The Omen (obviously) Lucius 1 does try to incorporate a dramatic story. And, even though, it is well (voice) acted and all the main draw of the game is still the kill.
So, interestingly enough –on a person psychological level, I skipped through most of the story because I didn’t want to get too close to the victims.
I have no qualms pretending to be a sociopath in a game. But when a character strikes me as sympathetic I will most certainly dislike killing that person (I’m a normal human being after all).
But this is, without a doubt the highlight of Lucius 1. It’s a puzzle game with a fatal win. But at the same time it plays with your player/human emotions by ‘telling you who the person you are killing is’.
In this sense it is far removed from the Mortal Kombat games.
Sub-zero might be a nice guy but in the end it’s still you against him in the pit. And he is trying to kill you.
You have to ‘push the button’ to proceed. Knowing full well that the person you are killing is kind and just.
If you don’t like it…then why did you start the game in the first place?
LUCIUS 2.Lucius 2, then is an entirely different game all together. Yes, some of the puzzles are still there. But overall it’s an open-world game in which you get to kill people whichever way you see fit.
You can kill a person with a complicated plot of an electrified phone and a call from a distance. Or you can just pour acid over the poor bloke.
Lucius 2 simplifies the murder spree but at the same time insinuates it.
You can either look for the clues and kill accordingly or you can go all out with every bit of ammo you have and kill with that.
Sometimes just turning off the life support of a patient is enough.
Whereas in the first part it were the puzzles that caused the murders that worked as the incentive. In the second part this puzzle element/motivation is removed somewhat.
Lucius 2, in this sense, makes YOU the murderer. A murderer who, by the way, is constantly checking his supplies of explosives and burnable substances.
Let me highlight some of the more elaborate killings:
- Calling a creepy guy on a payphone and then breaking the ceiling above him.
- Breaking a man´s radio and then letting him be crushed by some barrels.
- Poisoning a heart transplant.
- Locking somebody in a safe without oxygen.
- Setting off a woman´s car´s car alarm and then electrifying her.
- Calling a man and flinging a circular saw-blade at him.
- Pushing a man in a wood-chipper.
- Letting a smoker, smoke near a gas-leak.
- Poisoning a man’s facial cream with biological waste.
- And, of course, an instant classic, steam powered firing an adult toy at somebody.
No, subtlety isn´t Lucius´s game.
You can finish most levels without (hardly) murdering a soul. I would argue that only (about) 30 murders are needed to get certain keys (only because the game doesn’t allow pick pocketing).
An achievement the game makers should have incorporated: An angel boy escaping and killing a demon.
Yet you find yourself constantly worrying: ‘how to kill this soul’ or ‘how to kill that’. Only after the fact realizing that there was a way to kill that person that didn’t rely on you using your inventory.
In Lucius 2 the whole backstory of characters has been downsized to a small biography whenever your mouse hovers over a character. This time around there is no ‘playfulness’ between murder and ‘knowing the character’.
Though, as I mentioned above, it does occur.
Rather Lucius 2 is about killing the world in the most ingenious ways possible. People, therefore, become chess pieces: easily sacrificial. And the fun of it all is figuring out the most ingenious way to discard those people.
Lucius is a dark tale. And I’m happy to note that I just as easily play the Ducktales-remake as well.
Crushing a villain with a pogo-stick in delicious Technicolor…One can find darkness anywhere.
Summary
So why should you play this game?
The basis of this article is about the struggle between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in computer-games. In any Call of duty-game you are the hero killing hundreds for the right cause. I never liked that concept.
I prefer a more ‘real’ approach. And I found this ‘approach’ in Lucius.
In this fiction you are bad and everybody you meet is supposed to die by your hands. This is a honesty I like.
I argue that Lucius is more of a complete game because (in this narrative) this little sociopath doesn’t feel at all. In Lucius 1 there was still a game going on between me (the killer) and the victim and how much I might have liked him/her. But when part two rolled along the only feeling the player (me) feels is that whenever I kill a person I then realizes that there was a simpler way to kill.
As Lucius became darker from game 1 to 2, so did I.
A lovely game but play some Ducktales afterwards.
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