Lucky

Lucky comes to us from the developers of Bureau: Shattered Slipper.  That was an odd game that I wasn’t in love with, but enjoyed it enough to allow it to chum the bottom of the Leaderboard.  Well, they’re back with a game that exists outside of their Bureau series.  Here, you play as a stock broker who has a one night stand with a random chick.  The next morning, he wakes up and she predicts doom and gloom for him.  No, she didn’t secretly video tape the whole deal so that she can sell it to TMZ.  No, she doesn’t have a STD.  No, she wasn’t lying about being on the pill.  Her oddly specific prediction is that he will die while jogging less than an hour later of a brain aneurysm.   He shrugs it off, then immediately goes jogging.  Seems like it’s tempting the fates a little.  If someone came up to me and said “Cathy, you’ll die later today after getting mauled by an albino tiger” believe me, I’m cancelling that reservation to see Siegfried & Roy.

“What, you’ve never heard of hyper-super-syphilis? Well, you better Google it fast, because you’ve got it.”

Actually, the chick is your guide through the afterlife.  Thus, you begin a quest of personal self-discovery.  One that involves a lot of pointing, clicking, and being lectured on how rich people only got there by being lucky.  The moral message is pretty heavy-handed and often disagreeable, but the overall game isn’t so bad.  Think of it as a sweary, sexy After School Special with an utterly bullshit lesson to be learned.  Lucky can be finished in less than an hour and starting your average pull-cord lawnmower will provide you more difficulty.  But while the story is a bit on a the ultra-liberal side for my tastes and the dialog is clumsy, Lucky has charm about it.

I don’t really have a lot to say about Lucky.  There’s not a whole lot of objectives to it.  There’s only one real puzzle, and I’m not even sure how I solved it.  It involved lining up rows of numbers and hitting a button to spin them around.  I fumbled around with it for a bit and it seemed to have solved itself.  After that, you have to answer moral questions.  The first ones deal with how your father got his wealth.  Unless I missed a clue or something, it never actually tells you.  Don’t worry, the penalty for missing is watching a quick cut-scene of the dude dying, then you just go back to the choice.  Later, you’re placed in a giant maze to get further lectured on how lucky you are and how you’re not as smart as you think you are and OH FUCKING COME ON!  Look, I know that hating rich people is the flavor of the month, but not all rich people are evil, stupid, and lucky.  Some of them corrupt too!

♫ Dance Magic Dance Magic Dance Magic ♫

Anyway, after being punked out by a “spot the pattern” quiz that isn’t really a spot the pattern quiz, and being told to choose whether people with talent got rich via skill or luck, you’re freed from the afterlife and presumably go to heaven, which is full of self-loathing fat-cats and poor people, or so this game will have you believe.  So why did I like it?  Because it’s short, it’s silly, and I actually cared about how the story would play out.  That counts for something in my book.  I just wish we would leave politics out of gaming.  Gaming is my escape from politics.  My place where I don’t have to get hammered over the head by two groups of people talking about foreign policy, gun violence, the auto industry, and so forth.  Can’t a girl just mow down Russians while driving a stolen car and shooting hookers in peace?

I mean in a game.

Lucky was developed by Twist-EdGames

80 Microsoft Points told the lead character to go fuck himself, but wasn’t expecting THAT in the making of this review.

Lucky is Chick Approved.  Barely.  Check out the Leaderboard to see how many asses it’s sniffing.