2024 seems incredibly far away given the state of the world right now, but with today’s announcement of Lucid, a new Metroid-y Celeste from The Matte Black Studio and Apogee Entertainment, at least we’ll have one cool new video game to look forward to when it finally comes. roll. Earlier this year I got a sneak peek at Lucid behind closed doors at PAX East, and let me tell you, its gorgeous pixel art and emphasis on air piercing through crystalline barriers with a big-sounding ax looks great. Let’s admire his brilliant reveal trailer below.
Yeah, those are some of the great Celeste vibes I’m getting from that trailer, okay. However, Lucid will not be a simple platform game. Its corrupted world of Aedyn is a bit more open than Celeste’s mountaintop, with multiple locations to visit, puzzle-filled dungeons to tackle, big bosses to fight, and plenty of collectibles to tempt you off the beaten path, according to the developer. The Matte. Black Studio. It’s more of a Metroidvania, in other words, or, dare I say it, a ‘Celestroid’ perhaps?
Whatever your portmanteau of choice, you’ll play as Oenn, one of the last remaining Sentinels tasked with keeping the world in balance. Unfortunately, said world is now riddled with crystals, which you’ll need to destroy with your five unique crystal arts to get things back to normal. These crystal arts are hidden away in harsh looking dungeons, but eventually you’ll switch between your melee crystal sword, your long range crystal pulse gun, your giant crystal ax (which allows you to do a ground slam overhead) and pogo-esque. Throw crystal one after another as you go. It’s all to help search for broken pieces of the titular Lucid Giant, which lead developer Eric Manahan says you’ll use to take on the evil deity that threatens your homeland.
When I first saw Lucid at PAX East, what moved me the most was the way it asked players to chain together their various crystal arts to traverse its chasms and narrow corridors, creating an alluring sense of flow that looks like it’s going to be enchanting. and tactile under the thumbs. Hitting those red crystals to charge up Oenn’s pulse ability also reminded me a lot of Ori’s magnificent Bash attack from Ori And The Blind Forest, which everyone knows is the best thing to happen to modern platformers in recent memory. . Any game that channels that along with Celeste’s precision-based air jumps gets a big round of applause from me, and I’m excited to see more of it in the lead up to its release.
Unfortunately, Lucid won’t be coming to PC (and other “featured platforms”) until 2024, but if you want to stay up to date on its development, you can find out more on its Steam page.
