I could argue the worst offence that Luckyest commits is in its title spelling. However, I’d argue that this scratch card-inspired incremental game about balancing the odds of gambling finds itself in a slightly tricky predicament of upgrading itself out of its unique selling point. Did I have fun? Yes. Does Luckyest commit some genre-specific crimes? Also, yes.
What pulled me into Luckyest is its tagline and unique hook. The idea is to become the richest person on earth and you’ll do that by owning various businesses and betting on stock and sales for each business like a scratch card. At the start of each business venture, you’ll be presented with a 3×3 grid of squares. Hidden under the squares are prizes of stock to sell but it costs cash to scratch them. You’ll choose how much money you’d like to take into each transaction and hopefully win stock prizes to grow your money. For example, the first business is a vending machine. Each square costs $1 to scratch and reveal if something is underneath. If you take in $3 and scratch three empty squares, you lose that money. However, you might scratch a bag of crisps for $10 to then keep scratching with or you can cash out early. Each transaction tells you how many of each item is hidden, so the players know the odds. It is often heavily skewed towards you winning something on most turns, and so losses are quite rare and impact your time to complete rather than giving you a game over.
Luckyest is an incremental so of course there’s a large unlockable tree. In fact, there are two. The first is the main business tree. Each business you unlock can increase the number of squares per turn and the percentage of chance that low or high-value items appear. If you upgrade the percentages first before adding in more squares, you guarantee yourself to be rolling in money. You can also then upgrade your passive income rate with the items you find per turn, and this increases exponentially across the entire game. One of the items you can find in the scratch card squares is a prestige coin (looking suspiciously like a Doge coin) and these can be used in the second meta progression skill tree. When you prestige, you start again but come in with big bonuses from the second upgrade tree, like faster money, increasing the value of all items, or being able to hold more prestige coins to unlock earning money quicker.
If you prestige a few times, suddenly Luckyest becomes a breeze. I was able to complete the entire game and go from having $10 to $700t in under two hours. The prestige skill tree makes the latter half of upgrades very speedy and by this point, you’ll have so much money that you’ll be quickly clicking all the squares per scratch card without any consequence. The main upgrade tree doesn’t help with this either, as all the upgrades just make you earn more, faster, with less consequence for your actions. Unlike other incremental games, though, there isn’t much visual feedback to see the number go up in a tangible way. Instead, you are simply dipping in and out of scratch cards at pace to reach the end quickly. It may go against the fundamental principles of an incremental, but I wish there were a massive penalty for gambling and losing. There is no jeopardy or risk of true money loss that doesn’t take a maximum of ten seconds to earn back. It turns Luckyest into a clicker game, and that switches my mind off. That may be music to other gamers’ ears, but that’s not my preferred way to game.
By design, Luckyest is one of the shorter incremental games I’ve played. It doesn’t outstay its welcome yet it does manage to undermine its main selling point and gambling mechanic. I do think incremental gamers will enjoy Luckyest and have a brief blast with it, and the scratch card idea is a genuinely great one. I think I just wanted more risk from limited decision capabilities to gamble for high rewards, and this isn’t that game.
A review copy was provided by the developer. Luckyest is out on PC now.
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