Lucky comes to us from the developers of Bureau: Shattered Slipper. For the very few people familiar with it, this is an odd game with no connection to Bureau, which, unlike the title reviewed here, received a relatively decent response at least in terms of public interest. Here, you play as a stockbroker who spends an intimate night with a random woman. The next morning, he wakes up and the “crazy woman” predicts misfortune and gloom for him. It was not a threat... Her strangely specific prediction says he will die from a brain aneurysm within minutes, and that is what happens.
In the end, the woman is your guide through the afterlife. You thus embark on a quest of personal self-discovery. The game involves a great deal of pointing, clicking, and trying to lecture players about how rich people “only get there because they are lucky.” The moral message is very heavy-handed and often unpleasant, but the game as a whole is not that bad. Lucky can be completed in under an hour, and although it is easy, the story's ultra-liberal side and awkward dialogue give it a certain charm.
Puzzles interspersed throughout the 3D world highlight various issues as you force your way toward the end of your life. Some involve answering questions about your father, while others have you navigate a desert based on visual hints drawn from clues on a map. Like a choose-your-own-adventure story, bad decisions lead to painful deaths, sometimes by impalement and sometimes by thirst. One of the most intriguing puzzles asks you to decide which button will light up next among a set of green and red buttons. Trying to find a pattern is utterly bewildering because no discernible order can be seen. The solution turns out to be simpler and more fascinating than expected, and it is easy to feel guilty afterward.
Later, you are placed in a giant maze for more lectures about how you “are lucky and are not as smart as you think.” The game plays with common ideas about people who are born rich or receive extremely fortunate opportunities, but it does not deal as directly with someone who wins the Mega Sena, for example. It also seems quite unfair to people who clearly acquire wealth through their intelligence and particular abilities. In the end, however, the game explains its reasons.
After seeing this confusingly strange woman from a distance several times amid the general puzzles, the game develops a theme that becomes more specific later: “What is the secret of your success?”
The environments are aesthetically pleasing and well rendered, especially considering that one developer, Guy Galer, built all the geometry. A little more dynamism in the environments would have gone a long way toward making things more vibrant, since most of the settings are static. For example, a group of butterflies in the middle of the desert serves as clues but does not move, which feels dated even for 2012, the year the game was released. The character models do their job, and the “protagonist,” whose identity takes an unexpected turn, is attractive despite her highly curvaceous proportions in the style of “Lara Croft on the PS1.”
In any case, after being punished by bizarre trials and choosing whether you believe talented people became rich through skill or luck, you are set free into the afterlife. What is easy to like about Lucky, a short and somewhat bizarre indie game, is that it is trying to tell a story with a message. Regardless of what you may think about the message itself, this was a unique effort, with a well-written story exploring some of the ideas behind our biases about the factors that lead to success.
Lucky may not be as conventional as some point-and-click adventure games, but with a little luck, it may still become known to more people and perhaps one day turn into a cult classic among indie games. There is enough of this surreal atmosphere to offer a thought-provoking diversion. The game can currently be obtained only as an APK for Android, since the American Xbox Live service that hosted it and other indie games shut down some time ago.
Score: 6.5
Tested on an Android phone.
