A spark
I’m not really sure where to begin with Strayed Lights. It’s visually striking. It kind of has the vibes of 2012’s Journey or 2015’s Ori and the Blind Forest. Both of which are great inspirations. Designed as the first game by French developer, Embers.
I’m not sure I can spend that much time beating around the bush. From the time I’ve spent with Strayed Lights demo, I’m significantly underwhelmed. I want to stress that I’ve only played a small slice of the game; maybe 45 minutes. However, during that time, Strayed Lights failed to grab me. Beyond that, its core design is just kind of flat. So while there’s definitely a lot of potential that things could pick up, I can’t say I’m feeling optimistic.
Torch
You play as a light, I guess. You wake up as a light baby, then venture forth into a dark world before becoming a light lad. From there, you fight angry lights. There’s some indication that there’s a sort of corruption going on here, but the whole narrative unfolds without the use of dialogue. Which I love! However, I still need to know what I’m doing here. There is very little that suggests the scale of what’s going on, or even what your purpose is. I imagine this becomes more clear as things progress, but typically you need some bait to set the hook at the beginning.
To its credit, Strayed Lights does look pretty excellent. It’s not necessarily that it has a lot of fancy effects and lots of polygons, but rather it features a lot of detailed movement. The animation is very expressive, and there are a lot of fluttering leavings and swaying fur, which look great in the high-contrast visuals.
The environment in which the demo takes place is a little monotonous, but further trailers show some nicer-looking places. Again, I kind of feel like what I played doesn’t give the greatest impression of the game.
Both ends
Where I do feel a bit more let down is with the combat. On paper, it’s an interesting approach. Rather than just slam away on combos, Strayed Lights puts emphasis on parrying. You are able to attack directly, but you receive the most energy from perfectly timed parries. The goal is to charge a bar which, when full, ends the battle in a finishing move.
In order to make this a bit more interesting than, say, Assassin’s Creed, is how the game necessitates changing colors to parry specific attacks. The enemy will swap between orange and blue to try and throw you off, and the goal is to parry while lit up with the same color. It’s kind of like Ikaruga with fists.
The downside is that one button shoulder button swaps colors, and the other parries. Hear me out here: It’s one button press to change to match your foe’s color, then another to parry. Why? Why isn’t one shoulder button to parry as one color and the other to parry as the other color. That would make it much snappier. It’s not like it doesn’t work this way, but it just seems like the other way would allow combat to flow a lot better. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Ashes
Embers has certainly created an interesting-looking game with Strayed Lights, but as I tap my fingers on that shell, it sounds kind of hollow. I feel like I need to stress, once more, that this is all based off a short demo, so it’s possible that the game picks up after what I saw. It wouldn’t be the only game with a really short start.
On the other hand, I’m having trouble getting over the various weakness I bumped into. While I appreciate the minimalist narrative, it needs more than empty wonderment to make an impact. It’s not a very good mystery if there are no clues. Likewise, the abstract nature of everything needs some groundedness to allow the player to relate to what is happening.
Meanwhile, the gameplay is just okay. It’s nice to see a different approach to combat, but it needs a bit of polish to make it really snap.
Strayed Lights is currently slated for full release on April 25th. Here’s hoping that the full release puts the spotlight on special sauce that hasn’t yet been glimpsed.
