IanBrazen said:
It reminds me a lot of lemmings back in the day, but with lemmings when you got frustrated you could just kill all the green haired bastards.
Whenever me and me brother pushed the suicide button, and painted the walls with lemming we would yell "Fireworks, and lemming guts!"
I don't see a suicide button working for this game though.
I never played Lemmings, but you bring up a very valid point with that. With lemmings, you have several little critters to guide through the platforming, so you don't feel too bad if you lose a couple to whoopsies. It's like the description of the monkeysphere: [http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html]
David Wong in What Is The Monkeysphere? said:
First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.
...
Now imagine a hundred monkeys.
Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.
Lemmings were a faceless sea of green-haired little dudes, each one exactly the same, so it didn't matter if you lost a couple. You'll get them back when you gain extra lives.
Lucidity lacks this since it only has one main character, so it's more like Slappy than the faceless sea of monkeys. Not only is the emotional investment different, but from a gameplay angle, you have less resources to use in a game play style that really requires the player to have multiple resources to use because screwing up is downright likely.
This review reminded me of Game B in the NES game Gyromite where the main character is sleepwalking across the screen and the player must move the column obstacles to allow him to reach the end of the level. This game was designed for use with the R.O.B. robot, so the level design was decidedly easy because you would have to futz with the robot the entire time. But even this game was frustrating and lacking. Nintendo also had another, similar game called Gumshoe that used the Zapper.
Games where you do not directly control the main character like this have been tried from time to time with various themes. Bubble Ghost [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Ghost] (Soul Bubbles), Loco-Motion [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loco-Motion_(arcade_game)], World of Goo to a certain extent, and the afore-mentioned games. What seems to work for this kind of game is to either have one main play element and the entire level present on the screen so you can better plan ahead to reach the end of the level or you have multiple elements so that the occasional mistake is not so costly. In both cases, level design is not the same as it would be if the player had direct control over the element. It needs to be more forgiving as the player need to constantly switch through various items to get the element to move how they want.
In the case of Lucidity, it sounds like it is hampered by the random tool feature. (Is it really random? I haven't played, so I don't know) Such a game should have the same tools appear in the same order every time. Random tools like Tetris blocks is not a good idea. The level design needs to be much, much, much tighter for this style of play.
It may also be hamstrung by having so many tools at your disposal, even if you only get one at a time. The action of these games needs to be very simple so you can use the tools in complex ways. This method is more complicated than complex.
But now I'm just rambling. But when I look at a game, I like to try and think of a way to make it better as well as understand the underlying principles of what makes a game work or not work. This one is a poser since the gameplay style is slightly rare.