Lucky Mark [v18.0] (2.5/5 stars). This review contains spoilers.
Lucky Mark is a great game, when it works. The game starts and ends with a word of apology. With little instructions on what to do next, the game transitions into a free roam sandbox, forcing you to perform tasks in a blind, trial and error fashion. The game is unforgivably harsh with RNG pass checks and game over screens. There’s nothing intuitive or self-explanatory about maintaining stats. For example, why be chaste when it seems every interaction hinges on the lust attribute? Why is luck a hidden attribute, and when do I need it? And lastly, where do I go?
In short, Lucky Mark is unplayable without subverting the game design in some way: walkthroughs, cheats, mods, or editing saves. There is no getting around the fact there will be some obstacle blocking your progress. A fair amount of the enjoyment comes from being a diagnostician, figuring out what went wrong and how to proceed.
The main draw of the game are the cast. The short course is Mark leaves his family to go abroad to Bill’s house, where there’s a group of sexually repressed women: Elena, Bill’s trophy wife; a sadistic, icy blonde and Christina, the innocent step-daughter. Elena verbally abuses Mark, taking out her frustrations out on him and on Annie, the MC’s younger sister. Jennifer (Christina’s friend) and Zari (the family maid), Mia (Cheng's girl), and Katerina (Christina’s mom) are introduced and they are wonderfully designed, if underutilized.
The models are well-customized and unique, realistic proportions, attractive faces and bodies. Their looks match their personalities quite well, and the scenarios involving the characters are erotic, sexy. A turn-on. Of course, it depends entirely on what a person finds arousing. There’s a lot of buildup before Mark gets lucky, teasing, massaging, dream sex, fantasy sequences, and sleep sex (non-consensual sex involving drugs and alcohol), and voyeurism (borderline NTR with Bill). After all that, there are minigames during the sex scenes which involves a clicking a series of choices in a defined order to fully access the sexual content. That’s the other problem, there are no grand payoffs after dealing with the mechanics of the game, only small victories, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as the narrative is a template for the debauchery laying ahead.
In that sense, seeing this game as an excuse for porn, the writing is fine. The dialogue is unintentionally funny because the Russian to English translation is amusingly crude. Mark frequently says “I will process you!” during sex, or remarks like “My cock is on full alert!” as if he were a robot—no doubt such a machine translated Lucky Mark. The writing is less stilted, if stylistically clunky in later scenes. The language barrier ruins the dark, coarse, abrasive tone the game sets out for itself, most evident in the relationship between Bill and Elena. The scenes in the pool, as comical as Bill is as a villain, efforts into characterization are better than none. This is a variation on the classic wish-fulfillment, harem fantasy game, though it's unique in the sense the game is finished, and the developer follows through on the premise. The characters do not grow virtuous, or turn likable at any point; remarkably they double down on their flaws. Mark starts off as an overly submissive, weak character with a depraved mind, and he ends up corrupting all the women around him; their fall is Mark's gain. Elena's still a bitch (Mark's words) and Katerina is even more of a bitch. Christina is your wife, Zari your fucktoy, and Annie is reduced into a brocon. There isn't much of a fall, nor the satisfaction of wishful desire, since the characters remain largely the same, the MC supplants Bill's place of authority, his grip on them is based on financial rather than psychological motivations. Nevertheless, the end result is satisfyingly self-indulgent and lurid, and the content of the last update almost justifies the tedium and languor of the gameplay with the base excessiveness of the porn-like scenarios, and one wishes the whole game was like this: straightforward and to the point.
Lucky Mark is overengineered for what it is. The game piles on system upon system to pad out the content, of which there is a fair amount. Yet, despite the file size, Lucky Mark is missing some basic features. There’s no replay function, no galleries, no dialogue rollback/skip feature. In the main menu, the loading screen is tucked away, and save spots are limited. Since a lot of the events, nearly all endgame material, are non-repeatable, the only way to see these scenes a second time is through juggling saves. The lack of polish and quality control is highly regrettable. The music selection during the sex scenes are nice, a mix of Slavic-Arabic trap music and poppy tunes. (Coincidentally, the scenarios feel very Russian, as shown in the real-life porn clips and images used in the game). However, these tracks often overlap with the sound effects and the uninspired, looped background music, resulting in a wall of sound. And while the render quality is clean, with decent composition and lighting, the animations are choppy and inconsistent, eventually graduating from stop-motion to smoother animations at the end. Under the rubble of bad decisions of game design and balance, there’s great ideas and potentialities hidden underneath. As it stands, Lucky Mark is theoretically worth your time and effort if you take the developer's apologies to heart. Recommended with caveats.
