There was a pervasiveness to the exhaustion I was feeling about, well about everything, but I was feeling it most acutely when it came to gaming. Seemingly every title I looked at felt like it was asking too much of me: too much attention, too much time, too much investment in something that was supposed to be a fun escape from reality. Now that I’m working myself out that particular hole I can see it for what it was, my depression creeping its way back into my life again, but it was clear I needed comfort in something that didn’t ask much of me as a player. Whilst some might take that as a slight it’s anything but, and Lyca was the right kind of game I needed at the right time.
Lyca’s premise is simple: you’re a magical wolf who has the power to restore a barren wasteland into a vibrant field of verdant green. You do this by running around, breaking up the ground and spawning wild grasses. The next part is something that’s easily missed but if you run back over the grass you’ll bring it even further into life and generate yourself some currency that you can use on building out the skill tree. That skill tree then unlocks more abilities for you to do your job of bringing life back to the barren biome much easier and so the cycle continues as you pursue the incremental dream of making the numbers go higher.
I’ll admit to the first half hour or so being a bit confusing as I either missed a pop up or maybe clicked too fast on something which meant I didn’t really get the core mechanic. Really it’s simple: you need to “break” the earth to generate grass, then by running back over said grass you get the main currency. Your energy is depleted by both running around and by breaking ground, so the game’s opening moments are a balance between getting enough tiles green and having enough time to activate them. Once you’ve got that settled then it’s a pretty straightforward experience as you start chasing the various upgrades.
From there it’s actually a pretty linear experience as the upgrades are self explanatory. To be sure there’s likely a best path that you can directly optimise for but like most incrementals there comes a point where you’ve ticked off all the upgrades that seem important and the others feel more like nice to haves more than anything else. Lyca’s real trick though is having you build a talent tree all the way to the top only to then reveal that, no no no you’re not done yet, with the second progression path unlocking below. Usually I’d chide a game for a fake out like that but Lyca does it at just the right time in a playthrough; where you feel like you have command of everything and the challenge is starting to drain away.
There are a few technical issues that block one path of progression which was a little irritating. For some reason the game didn’t seem to recognise when the screen was fully filled with grass because of some of the gaps that appear which you can’t seem to fill no matter what you do. This meant that the challenges section of the game simply didn’t progress for me at all, no matter what I did. The Steam community forums had a few others experiencing the same issue so hopefully it’ll get fixed in a future revision.
Lyca is exactly what I’ve come to expect from this genre. It’s simple, has a good depth of mechanics and strikes the right balance between idler and clicker. I needed something like this to get me over the hump I was experiencing and Lyca hit the spot perfectly. There’s really not much more to say about it because if you’re into incrementals then you’ll already know what you’re signing up for.
Rating: 8.0/10
Lyca is available on PC and Nintendo Switch right now for $7.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 3 hours playtime and 83% of the achievements unlocked.
