Souls games are known for being tough, gritty, and dark. 505 Games and Point Blank Games have challenged the Souls game genre with Stray Blade, how does it stack up with some other Souls games?
Stray Blade follows an adventurer named Farren who while on an adventure has now found themselves in an unfamiliar world he must explore with his otherworldly companion Boji while fighting off enemies that are pursuing them on their adventure.
Now onto the game itself! The controls for Stray Blade are a touch confusing at first I’ll admit but having access to review the control scheme and having a tutorial helps. I don’t know if I just suck at my timing but I feel that the parry button is broken, no matter how much I time it I can’t parry but thankfully the dodge button works!
Stray Blade‘s sound design will need some tweaking when you first play depending on where you have the sound coming from, since I’m using headphones I need to adjust pretty much everything so I don’t blow my ears out!
The art and graphics for Stray Blade are quite bright and colorful which is a massive contradiction to those familiar with Souls games which are usually quite dark, it’s almost reminiscent of World of Warcraft. This leads to what gameplay is like, depending on your difficulty either the game becomes a hack-and-slash OR a traditional souls game where timed parries, dodges, and blocks are key to victory. Whether or not you’re playing it in story mode or harder difficulty, the game overall is a lighthearted adventure with witty dialogue. For a game of this type, it’s unfortunately linear, lacking an open-world feeling.
Overall, I would say Stray Blade is just OK. Would I say this is a kids-friendly Dark Souls? No, since it’s rated M for blood and violence which is surprising. Because of the issue with sound, controls, and the linear world negatively affecting the experience, the art, ability to customize the adventurer’s clothing (mainly just what the color is), the attempt to make it a light-hearted Souls adventure helps it not really fall too deep. On my scale of 1-10, Stray Blade is a 5.
Stray Blade is available now for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5.
