Welcome to my review of Strayed Lights. This game is brought to us by Embers who have published and developed the title. It is an action-adventure game where the player embodies a tiny being of light on its path towards awakening. Strayed Lights is available now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. For the purpose of this review, I was given a key for the Steam version on PC.
Seek Transcendence in Strayed Lights
Continue reading to find more out about the game.
The Game
Strayed Lights sees players taking control of a being of light that grows as it takes down more and more enemies. The world has had corruption take over, and it has infected your fellow siblings. Siblings are the creatures in the game, and one of them is what you control.
After a simple and short tutorial, we know how to play the game. To be fair, the concept of the game and the control scheme isn’t overly difficult to get your head around. However, this game does mix it up a bit in the fact that when you first start the game you cannot attack. You can defend yourself by parrying enemy attacks, in doing so you will build up your energy meter. When this is full you can unleash a defensive move that drains the life out of the enemy that’s attacking you.

Further into the game, you do get more skills and abilities, one of them being an attack move which helps a bit. I say a bit because it doesn’t drain as much of the enemy’s energy as a parry or even a perfect parry would but this can help in a pinch especially if the enemy has a very small amount of energy left.
Parrying isn’t as simple as it sounds though. Enemies will turn into one of three colours, you have to match the attacks to be able to parry the attacks and build up your energy meter. Red and blue can be parried, however, purple cannot. You can still defend from this but it will not add to your energy levels.
Some of the combat in the game is quite tough but once you get the hang of the patterns of each enemy type it becomes easier. Not simple, but easier. The fights are still quite tough, especially against the bigger bosses in the game where you have to continuously drain their energy bar down until you can finish them off with a quick time event “mini-game”. I feel this could have been mixed up a bit more though… Most of the boss fights end with you having to tap X (on an Xbox controller) until you push forward and then press LT and RT together.
Parry this Parry that…
The world that the developers have crafted for this game is incredible. There appears to be different biomes in the game. As for a story, I can’t really say much about that as it wasn’t overly obvious as to what was going on with the exception of corruption in the world and you have to help cure the infected siblings of this corruption.
Strayed Lights does have an “overworld” as such, this is called the inner world. This inner world is where you can transport to when you want to upgrade your abilities/skills. In the main world, you will find circles of light named energy orbs which go toward your energy affinity level which increases as energy gains.
There are skills such as the aforementioned attack skill when tapping RT during a fight. Abilities include a more powerful attack where your sibling will jump towards the enemy and deal a moderate amount of damage. Another is called shock, this stuns all enemies around allowing you to land some basic attacks on them.
I do like how players have to switch up the colour of the character to match the colour of the attacking enemy to parry and gain energy.
The game has 26 achievements for players to unlock. One playthrough saw me over 7 hours and I unlocked 18 of those achievements without trying.
I feel this could be a fairly easy 100% achievement/platinum trophy for those that want to hunt them. One thing to note is that when you finish the game, you have to start a new game. There was no apparent new game-plus mode to carry over unlocked abilities/skills.
Look & Sound
Where do I start? First of all, I’ve said it a lot of times to friends and I will say it again. Indie developers really do seem to take more care and put more passion in to their work. Strayed Lights is a gorgeous game from the moment you first get into the gameplay until you finish the story. The graphics on this game truly blew me away. I had zero issues whilst playing, no crashes, no bugs, and no massive drops in framerate… Nothing. The game just worked perfectly from the get-go. Numerous times through the game I would just stop and look at the environment.
It really is a sight to behold especially at 4K on PC.

I recommend you play this game with headphones, Why? because the audio in this game really is a treat to your ears. Of course, it still sounds amazing on speakers but to get that true sense of immersion I cannot recommend enough that you use a headset or earbuds.
Conclusions
Strayed Lights is an absolutely incredible game, I highly recommend you play it.
I score Strayed Lights a 9/10.
A code was kindly provided for us to review this.