Strayed Lights

Strayed Lights is a decent game with some good ideas but can’t use them to their full potential. The gameplay and enemy design will become repetitive after a while, but the narrative design of it is bold and something we don’t see often. Strayed Lights isn’t the best indie game of this year but it is worth a play if you are looking for something new.

Strayed Lights is a short and sweet game exploring a unique, defensive combat experience. It can feel shallow and falls short in aspects like the music, but it remains engaging throughout its runtime.

For a game designed by a relatively small indie studio, Strayed Lights is more than competent in terms of gameplay and combat.

Strayed Lights admirably tries its best to serve two masters, attempting to be a loving interpretive dance of a narrative held together with ruthless, tricky, defensive combat.

Strayed Lights is fun for what it is and a beauty to look at. However, hiding in the shadows are issues that left me wanting.

With its unique twist on combat and a great sense of style, I went into Strayed Lights with high hopes. However, while its presentation and challenging parry-centric boss battles certainly shine brightly, its largely nonexistent story, a lack of enemy variety, and frequent crashes caused that light to fade well before the conclusion of its four-hour runtime. If you’re simply looking for a novel take on the action-adventure genre, maybe pick this one up once it goes on sale. For anyone else, Strayed Lights is tough to recommend.

Strayed Lights is so dragged down by the almost non-existent story it almost becomes quite tedious to go from area to area during its gameplay that it’s hard to find a purpose to reach the finish line after a while.

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.