Strayed Lights Has A Bright Future
Strayed Lights was announced recently, and I was fortunate enough to have an early look at a build to share with you folks. No, not an exclusive, but sharing is caring. So, let’s take a quick look at this upcoming game from Embers.
Like exiting the luminescent primordial soup, your ever-evolving light entity dusts itself off and walks out into the big wide world. It’s a blur at first, quite literally, and there’s not much to do for the most impatient among us other than learn that you can crouch, sprint and jump. Oh, and you’ll develop into something else relatively quick.
Cue the bits you might have seen in the trailer as a battle commences. Strayed Lights relies on parries to defeat your foes. Like the shmup Pawarumi, you have to switch between two elements (presumably fire and ice), countering each attack on your character by matching the element of your attacker. Successive parries build up a gauge that unlocks a powerful move that repels the enemy backwards.
As well as the parrying, you’ll have to time your dodges and a third attack comparable to an unblockable move. The enemy will flash purple, to which you dart out of the way. Upon defeating the enemy, you’ll unlock energy that can be invested in a skill tree that allows such benefits as stealing energy or not having to switch between elements for a short duration. Cool.
Sound plays a big part in Strayed Lights, as there isn’t any active HUD or dialogue in the game. Instead, it relies on the musical score, which is quite cinematic. A lot has been said that this is Austin Wintory of ABZÛ and Journey fame, but it’s quite subdued. Still lovely, though. No doubt, the full game will be a little more… energetic… as the threats increase. My first impressions of the game were a little flat, however, as there’s not much to do.
The game world is pretty nice, with some wildlife that populates the backgrounds while moving around, but there doesn’t feel like there’s any urgency. Combat is easy, so there weren’t any worries that I’d die. That is until I fell off a ledge, the screen went black, and the game crashed. It happens, but it summed up the early experience and resulted in a hard reboot as I could not exit it.
The timing is quite forgiving but an essential part of gameplay. I will stress that from this preview alone, this is not a rhythm game (nor does it state it explicitly). The trailer is well-edited and gives the impression that the game might be played to the backdrop of the soundtrack, but that’s a coincidence. That’s not to say you can’t create your own fun and manipulate the battles so that the enemy attacks in time to the beat.
Strayed Lights is an intriguing title, but I’d like to see the full game before fully committing an opinion. There feels like quite a lot of open space in the game, and battles thus far have been predictable. That said, it has potential, so let’s see where it takes us when it releases in April of this year.