It must be fascinating to work somewhere like FromSoftware, and watching a game like Elden Ring grow from prototypes all the way to a polished, award-winning game. It makes you wonder if the magic is there in the early moments, when you are fighting blue boxes rather than hulking dragons.
It’s being entirely unfair on the glorious art and audio of Strayed Lights, but in many ways we can imagine it as an early prototype of Elden Ring. It feels like an exercise in stripping last year’s Game of the Year down to its basics, pulling out lore, worldbuilding, enemy design and more, and throwing it into a skip. What’s left is a familiar but basic playground: a world punctuated with enemies, the feeling that every enemy could gut you, and bosses offering more moves and maneuvers than the average player character does in any other game. We mean the comparison as a compliment.
What the comparison does do, is trivialise the beauty of Strayed Lights, so let’s right that wrong straight away. Strayed Lights is an ephemeral beauty: it takes the oneiric landscapes of The First Tree or Ori and the Will of the Wisps and creates a semi-open world out of them. Everything blooms and glows, lighting the way for you to explore and see what other wonder will creep over the horizon. For a debut game – and we’ll keep coming back to that – Strayed Lights is supremely confident artistically.
That’s true of the enemies too, although we did find the visual effects to become fatiguing and one-note over time. Development studio Embers take simple animal archetypes like monkeys and crabs, and then view them through a magma filter. They’re hulking creatures made out of rock and light, but they move like the animals you know. We’re going to give the credit to the animation team, who hand the animals some flowing moves, yet still manage to telegraph attacks that lamp you in the face.
The pinnacles are the bosses. Strayed Lights’ biggest success is how they can give these creatures personalities through their attacks, phases and animations. The first boss, a King Kong seen through the magma filter we mentioned, is so playful, picking up and playing with the local fauna. You can see the childlike curiosity in everything it does, and it almost makes you feel bad for eventually killing it. Well, you’re cleansing it, but the feeling remains the same.
The sheer craft of Straying Lights is there in the audio, too. It was always going to be a bit special, coming from the conductor’s baton of Austin Wintory, who gave us Journey and ABZÛ’s soundtracks. But there’s a listless gorgeousness to the music in particular, which ebbs and flows with each region.
So, when we say that Strayed Lights is like an Elden Ring prototype, don’t take it to be a criticism of the art. Because visually and sonically, Strayed Lights is one of the best games you will play this year. It’s not aiming for pixel-sharp realism, and shouldn’t be judged on it. This is a game that aims for a simplistic style and achieves it.
The story is entirely dialogue-free, as Strayed Lights risks making the game largely textless. Characters gesture towards things through icons and breadcrumbs, but mostly you are left to travel in the direction you want. This is nowhere more evident than in the Crossroads, a central hub where you take a path towards the ‘Siblings’, the bosses who have been corrupted by a malevolent mirror of yourself.
It can scupper the flow. On more than one occasion, we wondered where the game wanted us to go next. Was there still more to do in the biome we were in, or were we meant to head back to the Crossroads to take a different path? The same is true on a micro level. There aren’t many landmarks in the semi open-world areas, so it’s easy to get turned around and accidentally backtrack.
On your way, you will encounter enemies who will light up when you get close. It’s here where Strayed Lights and Embers become supremely confident and try something new. Rather than attack the enemies, you are parrying. The more you parry or dodge the enemies’ attacks, the quicker a bar fills that – effectively, but not narratively – represents their damage. Once full, you can tap LT and perform a cleanse-ality that exorcises the corruption and returns the enemy to normal.
Parrying is far from easy. The enemy will wind-up an attack, and you will need to tap the block button at precisely the moment the lunge, grab or scoop would hit you. We will admit to harbouring a bit of a criticism of Strayed Lights here: like Neymar taking a penalty, sometimes there’s a bit of a delay and feint between the initial animation and when the attack lands. An enemy can pull back their swing, wait a bit, wait a bit, and then attack, making the visual telegraphing a little on the imprecise side. We know why Strayed Lights is doing it: they want some memory muscles to build up. But it doesn’t stop tense boss encounters being an initial pain in the arse, because the visual cues aren’t reliable.
Nor is the parrying as easy as we’ve described it. Because you not only have to time the block, but you have to be in the right stance, too. This is cycled through with the shoulder buttons, turning you different colours to match the colour of the enemy approaching you. It’s inordinately clever, particularly as the whole enemy shifts hue – there’s no mistaking which colour you really should have been – and often the colour-change can happen only moments before the attack. It keeps you on your toes, and you will need some reflexes and skill to keep yourself from dying.
Strayed Lights isn’t FromSoftware-hard, but it is demanding. You will need to be fully invested in every battle, as a simple grunt can kill you if you’re not paying attention. When multiple enemies are heading for you, some with projectiles, then the multi-tasking is real. Luckily, there is mitigation to be had in difficulty settings, and we feel like Embers is reducing the challenge of bosses every time we fail. We see you, Embers.
The abiding feeling that we had playing Strayed Lights was that it was a confident strut of a game for a debut studio. Embers can be proud of what they’ve made here: this is a game that had us in a chokehold for a couple of evenings, often literally, and we weren’t going to stop until all Siblings had been dealt with.
Strayed Lights’ pacifist, parry-led combat felt out of reach at first, but then we found the rhythms of it. We were switching colours on cue, like a mobile rave. We weren’t sold on some visual telegraphing, and the exploration could do with some spit and polish, but everything else here is immaculate. So, treat your fingertips and let Strayed Lights brighten up your evenings.
