When we checked out a preview build of Strayed Lights a few months ago, we didn't know what to expect. We hadn't heard much about the title beforehand, and even after playing through the build, we still did not know too much. What was there was intriguing, and we wanted to follow up to see how the final build turned out. The final game is here, and it remains intriguing.

The sense of intrigue starts with the story, which sees you as a ball of energy at birth. You slowly grow as you traverse a rainy and rocky landscape until you become a child faced with an alternate version of yourself. You soon get locked into a battle with your alter ego for your source of power until that power gets shattered and spread into various lands. It falls on you to go to these varied places to retrieve that power and put it back together.

If you're looking for a game that lets you freely interpret its story, then you've found it in Strayed Lights. None of the characters speak, and there are no written words about anything, from the beginning of the game until the credits roll at the end. The only hint as to what may be going on lies in the Achievement names and descriptions, and even that gets hidden away if you turn off Steam notifications. Unless you're willing to dig around the studio's website to see what's going on, there's nothing to indicate what the story should be about versus what you may think it's about.

For the most part, a good chunk of the game is spent traversing landscapes of all types, from rocky landscapes to lush forests. A few friendly creatures populate the locales, and they greet you but say nothing. The game tries its best to naturally guide you to your destination by removing any markers, arrows or hints about where you should go. The levels seem open until you realize that all of the alternate paths you see don't necessarily lead to new and different areas. Finding and exploring them is still something you'd want to do, since they hide things that help you power you faster.

Combat is where things get interesting, as it doesn't follow normal expectations. You have a few attacks like a three-combo slash, but the damage is so slight that you might be better off not using it. Your main maneuvers are all defensive, as you'll spend your time blocking and parrying attacks. While the former is fine in a pinch, you'll concentrate on the latter, since that's how you build energy and replenish health that you may have lost. Filling up the energy meter gives you the chance to release a pure energy blast that's powerful enough to kill enemies in one shot.

To add some complexity to the parrying, you can switch colors from blue to orange and back again. Colors play an important part in the fight, as performing a parry with the same colors results in a successful move, while parrying with different colors results in a simple block. It also plays a role in reeling enemy attacks, as enemies that turn purple have unblockable moves that require you to perform a dodge to not get hit.

The heavy focus on the parry segments the game's potential audience, and there are moments when the system doesn't do anyone any favors. Timing on the parry can be figured out easily, but the window for dodging is so small that many will find it to be an impossible feat. Oddly enough, it doesn't become too much of an issue during boss fights, where dodging is more forgiving. There's also not much when it comes to enemy variety, and the ones you face employ the same patterns, making regular fights a bit of a chore. The bosses provide the only reliable source of combat variety, but you can't run from any overly long fight with the minions.

That said, there are still parts of the experience that are enjoyable. Strayed Lights may feel punishing when you're still learning how to parry, but the game only ever tries your luck a few times by throwing no more than two enemies on-screen at a time. Dying doesn't happen often, but you can come back quickly, and full health refills at the end of every fight ensure that you won't experience quick deaths via an errant hit. The game saves almost all the time, so respawning leads to little to no backtracking. The skill tree provides upgrades that are significant enough that you can ignore the color-changing mechanic for parrying if you power up correctly.

The game is fairly short, clocking it at an average of five hours, depending on how you do with the parry system. The game features three different difficulty levels that can be switched to on the fly, which makes it great for those who might find the adventure to be sliding too far down one spectrum. One thing that is a little disappointing is that there's no New Game+ mode, so you can't replay the experience with a more powerful character, something you might want to do since there's no way to fully up in one run.

The overall presentation is interesting. The environments are pretty to look at, and while the characters have a decent design, their use of light and shadow and other particle effects makes the game's look stand out more. The title easily runs at a very high frame rate with everything turned up, even on low-end systems. The soundtrack is quite good and does a nice job of creating some low-key action situations when needed while also letting the player know when to breathe and take in the sights. There are moments when the vibe of the tracks don't match with the on-screen action, but that doesn't happen too often.

It was a surprise to see that the preview build wouldn't run on the Steam Deck, especially since the device seemed perfectly fine with almost every other indie game we've thrown at it. The game is marked as Playable on the Steam Page, and that's mostly right. The game boots with the default version of Proton, but it does so after a bit of wait time and with a warning about text possibly being too small on the display. Get into the game, and the battery life takes a dive when entering gameplay but is restored when entering the hub world, averaging about two hours. The frame rate can hit 60fps for a good deal of time, but it dips in combat. It doesn't make the title unplayable, since you can still hit the timings for a parry when the frame rate drops to the 50s, but the game also drops to the mid-30s when you're close to death. What hurts more are the crashes, which come without warning and take you to the standard error screen for Unreal Engine 4. The game saves at almost every opportunity, so little to no progress is ever lost, but it remains annoying enough that the Steam Deck might not be ideal to play this title.

Your view of Strayed Lights is going to depend on what kind of player you are. If you love playing defensively, then you'll like what's on offer, as it mostly works with a few hiccups. If you're more of an attacker, then the slower-paced fights and lack of minion variety doesn't make for an appealing adventure. The game is short enough that it doesn't drag on for too long, making it worth experiencing for those who are intrigued.

Score: 7.0/10