Strayed Lights: Incredible art direction that has big potential

A world with an impressive look, a soundtrack that elevates emotions and a somewhat interesting gameplay. It is with these qualities that Strayed Lights catches the attention of gamers.

The game takes place in a world where the shadow tries to dominate everything and you control the character who has the biggest task to restore the light. Here the whole story is presented with just the actions of the characters, without any words. And that’s not a problem because everything is very well told and some details are left to the imagination of the player and who may be watching a stream, after all, sometimes it’s better to simplify than to disturb a more fluid gameplay.

Gameplay is the focus of Strayed Lights

Gameplay which is the main focus of the game. There aren’t many enemies in the scenario and they also don’t respawn if the player goes back to places already visited, but that has an explanation, as the gameplay is somewhat different.

In Strayed Lights all combat has a main objective of you defending your enemies’ blows and to add another layer, you need to use color swapping to defend your enemies’ attacks correspondingly.

It’s a very interesting idea that entertains, but sometimes slides into not having more visual cues to inform where the player is making mistakes in the defenses. Of course, it’s not just defending that you do damage to the enemy, you also have a basic attack and a special one, but the first one isn’t so interesting to use because it can break the player’s rhythm and on top of that it doesn’t have a very high damage. And after you deplete the enemy’s bar, you need to use a special action to recover your energy and gain materials to improve your skills.

Fast but exciting

The “phases” that the game provides are not long, as the big show is in the battles against the bosses. They are exciting animations and also have “Quick Time Events” to add more interactivity for the player.

All of this becomes very good to play and to watch if it is being shown in a stream. And the fights don’t become tiring, because the game is very generous with the “checkpoints” and so the fights are hardly tiring.

Fights here have a good balance of difficulty, as I didn’t see extremely difficult challenges, despite the game having a boss at a certain point in the game that has very confusing visual patterns, but it doesn’t spoil the overall experience.

Not everything is perfect…

But since not everything is perfect, the game has some minor adjustment issues, the main one being death by falling. It may be that the player ends up wanting to pick up some collectibles in the main areas where the “phases” of the game connect and you find that you can die swimming or simply jumping from high platforms in a region where there are no enemies or challenges to be overcome, which it could be the other way around and the player has complete freedom to walk through these safe zones.

The second point is due to the game’s performance, where I came across several small crashes (perhaps due to shader compilation) that happened even in fights against important bosses and frame drops. A little more optimization was needed to make the experience more pleasant and smooth.

Even with these problems, it is not something that will spoil the player’s experience, because as there are few enemies and more space for contemplation of the creators’ vision, the player will rarely find himself being hindered by these problems.

This vision of a more rhythmic gameplay is even an advantage if the player is broadcasting the game to an audience, as this will have plenty of time to interact and the audience can feel captivated by the beautiful art of the game and the dual color system that is very interesting and fun.

Well, finally, the game has a duration of about 4 hours. It’s a short journey, but one that because of the gameplay choice I believe is just the right length. For those who want to spend more time in the game, a mode has been made available in the last updates to revisit the fight against the game’s bosses.

Unfortunately it does not support all controllers available on the market (since the game recommends playing with one).

Katsutoshi