‘Strayed Lights’ is Good, But It’s Missing Something
Last month, I attended PAX East where I got a chance to preview Strayed Lights ahead of its late-April release. The clean simplicity of its premise and presentation caused Strayed Lights to stand out above dozens of other titles. In my PAX article, I described Strayed Lights as “an unexpected mashup of Journey and Dark Souls,” an out-of-nowhere title that, once I had finished the hands-on demo, shot to the top of my most anticipated indies of 2023.
Strayed Lights has since been released and I have rolled credits. But instead of feeling accomplished, celebrating the successes of this nine-person development studio, I felt a sort of emptiness, like the game didn’t really do anything for me despite my high degree of anticipation. Obviously, I don’t want to trash this game in discussing it, especially since I received a review copy for free. But in my experience, all of the charms of Strayed Lights faded rather quickly, and I was relieved when I realized I had reached the game’s final boss.
Limitations of the Combat System
Strayed Lights isn’t even a particularly long game. My own completion time on Steam sits at just under five hours. But the game’s core gimmick, color coded parry timing, never really evolves in interesting ways. This lack of evolution gradually wore on me while playing, and after my second boss fight, I noticed myself sprinting past normal enemies throughout the environments. Though defeating these normal enemies yields helpful glowing shards that unlock various expanded abilities for your character, the notion of fighting them became a test of my patience.
Since you don’t really have the ability to attack in Strayed Lights, you spend a lot of time just sitting there waiting for an enemy to wind up their next parryable attack. This combat design didn’t strike me as having issues on the PAX show floor, as I was still acclimating to the controls. Sitting at my home computer playing these bosses back-to-back, however, I realized just how tedious that absence of attack felt in repeated combat scenarios. Unlike any Souls-like I’ve played, where your patience is rewarded by moments to sneak in extra attacks, Strayed Lights doesn’t create any chance for momentum. At best, you’re playing a game of Simon.
Understanding Parries in Strayed Lights
Enemy attacks come in waves that become predictable quite quickly, and even some less predictable patterns can be memorized within a death or two. The basic premise of combat is that you find yourself in (mostly) one-on-one face-offs, circling around an enemy as they wind up to unleash blue, orange, and purple attacks. Your playable character can alternate which color it blocks by using the left shoulder button; as each attack lands, you parry with the right shoulder button. Purple attacks cannot be properly parried as such, requiring you to dodge instead. It’s a simple loop that gradually becomes more complex. The problem, however, is that this game always puts the player in a reactive state, rather than an active and engaged one.
Weirdly, I felt like I never quite got the feel of parry timing in Strayed Lights, even as I advanced through each encounter. I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, what buttons to hit, and when to press them, but I still only managed to perfectly parry about two-thirds of the time. Luckily, that’s a success rate that balanced out within my health bar – as successful parries heal damage, while unsuccessful ones cause you to take damage. But there were definitely a few boss encounters near the end of the game where I said out loud to my computer, “What on earth? Uh, I guess I didn’t block that attack,” before promptly dying.
Visually, the boss designs are distinctive, and the symbolic emotions that they represent are well-communicated through frequent cutscenes. Fighting them, however, only felt similarly distinct in the final two boss encounters. Every boss fight ends with a QTE-style sequence where you have to repeatedly mash the “X” button and then squeeze both trigger buttons simultaneously before their corrupted inner nature is defeated. (I find it incredibly frustrating that the game contained no accessibility options to eliminate the requirement to repeatedly press the “X” button, especially as someone who suffers from RSI in both hands.) I strongly wish that the fights themselves required you to differently engage with the parrying mechanics, or that there was something you could do other than wait during these sequences.
Admittedly, the game does have a skill tree which contains a stun attack that your character can use to inflict damage on the bosses. But, at best, fully expanded, you can deal only three of these attacks in one boss fight. The energy you expend when executing these attacks comes from a finite pool that is only recharged when eliminating smaller enemies. Since the boss battles are basically one-on-one parry tests, there’s no way that the game rewards you for approaching these boss fights with any degree of creative freedom. Once your three punches are used, you’re back to waiting. What makes matters worse is that these punches at best have the same effect as a single parry; the only real benefit to using them is to interrupt an attack cycle and initiate the next one.
Issues With The (Beautiful) Overworld
These shortcomings with combat manifested in the traversal of Strayed Lights’ world as well. While initially, I went out of my way to explore each nook and cranny of the world, I was soon making calculations about the quickest and most efficient path to the next boss. This shift occurred because the non-boss encounters were exhausting, annoying, and time consuming – for little reward. Sometimes the game mixes it up by throwing two enemies at you at once. While I think this mix-up could feel welcome during a boss arena, i.e. increase boss difficulty and restore punches, it was frustrating in the game world because of the types of enemies paired together.
My least favorite enemy pairing is as follows: One of the enemy monsters is two legged and has a giant crystal in its head that it uses to teleport around and shoot an unblockable laser beam at the player. The other enemy is stout and frequently charges up unblockable attacks, some of which occur twice in a row, causing you to dodge and lose track of the alternate enemy’s pattern. On their own, neither one of these enemy types are particularly tough. Together, they are deadly. Getting into combat with these two enemy types meant I’d be constantly dodging, getting maybe one or two parries in, and then the cycle repeats. Luckily, these encounters are not mandatory, and the game allows you to keep running around and disengage from these attacks if you choose to avoid them.
Reimagining Strayed Lights
For all its faults, the idea of Strayed Lights’ combat system really seems like an inventive twist on the lock-on approach to boss arena combat. It’s just a shame that the developers’ commitment to the non-violent approach to enemy encounters – parrying instead of fighting back – comes at the expense of the game recognizing a need to evolve and vary the mechanics. With a fully complete skill tree, I didn’t really feel any different than before I had unlocked any upgrades, and this lack of change strikes me as a fundamental problem that culminated in me losing energy and enthusiasm for this title for which I was otherwise excited.
I would love to see a version of Strayed Lights where traversal during combat mattered more than it does, where skilled players who complete a perfect chain of parries unlocked a temporary counterattack, where bosses challenged your expectations more than your reaction times. There’s something really cool in here, I just don’t think the premise is enough to carry this game to credits on its own – a similar feeling to my issues with Metal: Hellsinger. As it stands, the combat of Strayed Lights feels rather dim by the end.
Just to be clear, I do not hate Strayed Lights, think it’s a badly made game, nor want others to avoid it entirely. As a combat-dependent experience, Strayed Lights unfortunately did not work for me, and that’s okay – even though disappointing. There are still some gorgeously sculpted environments ranging from breathtakingly beautiful to magical and mysterious. Taking screenshots never lost its fun. And Austin Wintory’s soundtrack, in the rare moments where you are allowed to live with its dynamism, adds a layer of prestige and excellence that benefits Strayed Lights greatly.
Strayed Lights is good, but it’s missing something. I’m grateful that the game does not drag itself out into some 15+ hour affair, because what works here works best when it’s brief – as evidenced by my glowing PAX impressions. I think it’s a polished first effort from Embers, the developers of Strayed Lights. I’m sure that there were many lessons learned with this project, but it’s certainly an impressive debut. I’ll be interested in watching what Embers cooks up next.
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