Strayed Lights

I was sold on Strayed Lights for the same reason as Batora: Lost Haven -- shiny colors. Gameplay had seemed competent enough but once again it was proven that visuals alone won't carry a game. But pretty Strayed Lights is. There's again a duality of colors -- blue and orange -- but purple also makes an appearance as the color of corruption as is tradition.

Strayed: Lights Die Twice

Strayed Lights features no speech nor text so there was at least no chance for writing to be bad. You play as some sort of creature of light, a newborn flame, that soon has to fight against a shadow entity that corrupts your siblings and scatters them across the realms. Your task is to find and soothe them after first defeating them in boss fights.

Where Batora makes you shift between color-coded stances to be able to deal damage to matching enemies, in Strayed Lights you need it to be able to parry attacks. Enemies similarly shift between colors and you need to be in the matching one for parry to work. They can also shift to purple whose attacks you can't parry and have to dodge instead. The dodge's i-frames window seemed rather precise and I was not a fan of it.

It didn't matter on medium difficulty, though. You heal from parries, and them being considerably easier to succeed at, getting hit by few attacks here and there, purple or otherwise, was not an issue. Unfortunately there's also an achievement for beating a boss fight without taking damage.

You have a pocket plane of sorts where you level up and also are able to fight again the bosses you've already defeated -- for fun, I guess. I was waiting to encounter one that would be easy beat flawlessly but they all seemed to feature annoying purple attacks. Finally a huge gorilla-like boss, and especially the third encounter, had easy to dodge purple attacks and I began my attempt. After a couple of flawless victories, it appeared that you either have to do the no-hit achievement when going through the game normally or the achievement was bugged (which it turned out not to be).

I had to replay the majority of the game anyway because I had missed one energy affinity upgrade (devilishly hidden to your left just after a gap onto a narrow stone pillar bridge) in a place you can't return to and thus couldn't get the related achievement for gathering them all. If you have trouble keeping the track of having been hit during a boss fight -- and thus need to reload for the achievement -- you can take the perk that gives you a counterattack after successfully parrying a whole attack chain. If you get the attack prompt after every orange-blue chain, you've never been hit. And you will know if you've been hit by the gorilla's purple attacks because you got grabbed or thrown back with a lot of damage.

Difficulty affects how often enemies shift between colors. I did the partial replay on Easy to spend less time on it and had to then learn new patterns on the gorilla boss. Difficulty can be changed during a playthrough, though, so I guess I could have done that too.

Parrying adds to your energy gauge, and once full, you can end a fight. You accrue energy from basic attacks and a limited dash attack too but parrying is the essence of the the game's combat. And that's pretty much the whole experience of Strayed Lights in addition to its visuals.

The game's music was composed by Austin Wintory, a rather distinguished fellow in the field, his name appearing in the credits of many titles -- even two I had played before: Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Eternal Strands. I can't say anything on this one's soundtrack stuck to me as particularly memorable, though.