Strayed Lights is marketed as a meditative journey by French developers Ember.
In Strayed Lights, you play being of light and darkness (well.. orange and blue) as it progresses though a dreamlike world in order to achieve awakening.
Violent shadow creatures will stand in the tiny light’s path, but these monsters are meant to be soothed, not slaughtered....
There's no doubt that Strayed Lights is a beautiful game, but that's really where any praise ends.
Far from being a "soothing meditative experience" , I found it a frustrating and boring chore to play.
To sum up the core gameplay, your character can switch between orange and blue colors.
The enemies you encounter also switch between orange and blue colors. While enemies can attack you, you can only Dodge or Parry.
You must change your color to Parry the enemies attack of the same color.
Each successful parry builds an ultimate bar, when the ultimate bar is full, you press some QTE buttons and the enemy is defeated or as the game likes to say "soothed".
Next you walk and overly long pathway to encounter another similar looking enemy, in a similar environment to dispatch in a similar manner..... Yawn
If this sounds incredibly boring, it's because it is!
Not only are the enemies particularly samey, the environments are likewise not especially stimulating.
If you can imagine a game like Sekiro, Nioh or WoLong, completely stripped of any interesting mechanics, abilities or environments then that's pretty much Strayed Lights. It's a barebones parry simulator.
You basically just walk, parry, QTE.
In fact, the highlight of any encounter is when the enemy turns purple for an unblockable attack which you must dodge!
As you progress, you can level up your character; but in all honesty the abilities that you unlock only increase the monotony of an already dull experience.
For example, one of the first abilities you can unlock allows you to bypass the need to shift colors to Parry enemy attacks for a set period. So now I just need to press one button instead of two?
When you think of relaxing game experiences the most immediate titles that spring to my mind are Journey and Abzu.
Strayed Lights isn't anywhere near the same caliber and your time and money would be far better spent playing these games if you haven't already.
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