Published , by Nick Tan
Published , by Nick Tan
On paper, Strayed Lights has the right ingredients for a potential masterpiece — an interesting combat system based on parries, a wordless story set in a mysterious world, a somewhat abstract art style, and a soundtrack made by composer Austin Wintory from 2012’s Journey. For its debut title, developer Embers aims to create a profound, artistic adventure about light and darkness on both a literal and symbolic level. Unfortunately, the floaty platforming and awkward combat leave a lot to be desired, and the fights in particular will likely frustrate many players.
Emerging from a pod as a newborn being made out of light, your nameless character stumbles out into a raging storm in a world drenched in purples and blues. The pacing of the intro is somewhat slow, but it’s not too long until you become a stronger humanoid vessel after seeing your reflection. However, that comes with a risk of corruption as a dark entity attempts to rob you of what is essentially your soul, depicted as an orb of your inner light. In the conflict, the orb shatters across the many areas of the world, thereby calling you to gather, ahem, the strayed lights throughout the game.
Strayed Lights features a story without words, which is a good technique to use for what is a short and mostly simple narrative. There are a few twists when it comes to the bosses, particularly one involving some scuttling insects, and you can unlock several images of the past that provide some hints of who you are and how you came to be. That said, the mystery isn’t particularly difficult to solve, as it’s fairly easy to work out what’s going on by paying attention to any text the game does give you and by looking at the descriptions in the achievements list.
Where the game’s narrative could have improved is in its environmental storytelling. It isn’t deficient by any means, but compared to other games like Journey and Abzu, there weren't enough points of interest to make me wonder about the world all that much. It's a mystery without enough hooks. At least there’s a cute deer-like animal, more than several waterfalls, and a cool dream-like sequence in the back half of the story, but most of what I explored were a bunch of random ruins. Exploration is mainly done out of finding clumps of energy collectibles rather than uncovering more about the lore. It also doesn’t help that platforming and movement feel very loose, imprecise, and underdeveloped.
The combat system of Strayed Lights is primarily focused on parrying attacks, which will likely make or break the game for you depending on what you prefer. There's only one difficulty setting, so if you're not good at performing counters, there's not much you can do about it here. I’m not usually the type of player who likes parrying in Dark Souls or even in Street Fighter III unless a fireball is coming my way. But I followed along as best I could, being patient and waiting for enemy strikes to finish. There were times where I could perform regular attacks, but since they don’t do as much damage as a well-timed counter, parrying is still the main bread and butter here.
Still, countering at the right time is only half the challenge. Similar to Outland and Ikaruga, you need to ensure that you are countering attacks with the right color, be it blue or orange. Parrying with the wrong color will merely block damage, while doing so with the right one will build your momentum meter and heal a portion of your health. Fill the meter all the way and you can defeat a creature immediately, unless it’s a boss with multiple stages or forms. This also usually triggers a QTE sequence, though it’s largely unnecessary since you can’t fail it.
In theory, this system makes fights feel rhythmic by figuring out the sequence of enemy attack strings. Sometimes this works, particularly after facing a foe several times and nailing a tricky sequence that you’ve failed multiple times before. With enough attempts, I was able to sit in the groove and bring most bosses back to their senses.
But the main trouble with the parrying system is that you need to press a button to switch between blue and orange. It would have been far more efficient if one button parried blue and another parried orange. As it stands, the control scheme makes the difficulty feel artificially harder. Facing off against two enemies at the same time as they swipe at you with different colors, including purple attacks that can’t be parried, is harder than it should be. It just lacks control.
In fact, some of the abilities in the skill tree can stun enemies or allow you to counter both colors for a limited time, effectively sidelining the parry system altogether. While I used the stun ability right from the beginning, it just feels awkward to see a progression system, which is already quite minimal, that runs against the core gameplay. It's almost admitting that the parry system is too complicated.
As for the presentation, Strayed Lights is a mixed bag. Its visuals lean on the art direction over technical prowess, banking on a graphical style that looks like a 3D rendering of Ori and the Blind Forest. The choice of color palettes is spot on. Buf if you inspect some of the objects in the environment close up, the details are somewhat flat. On the better side, the soundtrack by Wintory serves as a strong accompaniment to the gameplay, though it’s not as riveting as his prior work. The sound design could also have put more effort into footsteps and vocalization to make movement and NPCs more present.
Strayed Lights is ultimately frustrating because there’s a brilliant game lurking somewhere here. Upon finishing the game, I understood the story to be about conquering corruptive behavior and going on a spiritual journey inward, but it’s let down by subpar platforming and gameplay. I would even argue that the game might not have needed combat at all and could have worked better as an explorative adventure instead. Perhaps Embers might consider this for its next project.
This review is based on a PC digital code supplied by the publisher. It is available on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.