Stray Blade Review
It can be tough to stand out from the pack when creating another Dark Souls-inspired action game to toss on the pile. In theory, developer Point Blank Games had the right idea of how to do it with Stray Blade, making a more approachable soulslike with a focus heavily on traditional storytelling in a bright fantasy setting. But while that makes for a great first impression, every piece of it falls short of both its own ambitions and the high bar set by others in the genre. Poor level design, uninteresting world building, and shoddy combat mechanics keep this stray from ever finding its way home.
As the capable and curious Farren, you find yourself trapped on the magical island of Arcea with no way off besides being led on a quest to kill some big bad guys, break a magic seal, and yada yada yada – you know the drill. As much as I came to like the self-important heart of gold hero Farren and their relationship to their scrappy and altruistic spell slinging sidekick, Boji, this story has nothing you haven’t heard before, and is told in largely forgettable expository dialogue and lore pickups. When following the main path, I felt like I was stopping to hear the two characters riffing off of one another about the local environment, their backgrounds, or the mission way too often. The trope of lonely, barren, and opaque soulslike storytelling is tired these days, but Stray Blade feels like it overcorrected in its attempt to swing the opposite way.
The world itself is very pretty, at least. It’s epic scale and bright colors really help make Acrea look like a storybook fantasy world teeming with magic. The locations themselves don’t feel much different from one another outside of the colors and flora though. You do the same sort of
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