14 DAY TRIAL // LucasArts has officially announced that it plans to develop and publish a new Xbox Live Arcade and PC platformer called Lucidity, ending some long running speculations about the new videogame that the company was supposed to be developing.
Lucidity does not have a clear release date at the moment but the company is saying that it should be out in about one month, with the XBLA release probably coming in before the PC one. LucasArts is also saying that it plans to create more original titles internally and that it will be announcing more titles soon.
Darrel Rodriguez, who is the president of LucasArts, has said that “Lucidity comes from our effort at LucasArts to form several small internal development teams and give them the creative freedom to make games that surprise, amaze and inspire.”
He also believes that the re-release of The Secret of Monkey Island and this new project are “just the beginning of this effort.” Both games are being developed by the same team at LucasArts.
Lucidity will be interesting mainly because of the control scheme. Players will not directly guide the main character. They will only have the option to place tiles indicating how she should be moving so the platformer appearance of Lucidity reveals the existence of a complex puzzle challenge. The game also sports an interesting look, somewhere between hand-drawn animation and classic story book panels.
LucasArts has been concentrating lately on developing intellectual property created during the '90's, when it mainly designed single player adventure games. With The Secret of Monkey Island being so well received when it was remade and with Star Wars still offering plenty of material for videogames, it's nice to see that LucasArts is interested in creating new intellectual properties.