Striving for Light is an action roguelike with hack-and-slash combat and an infinitely expanding skill tree. It’s a novel idea for a roguelike but given the game’s Early Access status, there’s a lot of room to grow.
Graphics
The handpainted art style is rough around the edges but has an indie charm. Everything looks a little odd or goofy, but not outright bad. Sometimes the motion blur is a bit much, but my only major complaint is the lack of visibility caused by certain skill upgrades. You can add fire and explosions to your attacks, but when you combine it with the AoE size increase, you get massive orange circles covering half the screen.
Gameplay – Combat
You begin each run with a ranged and melee weapon that you can switch between during combat. There’s a stamina system, but it isn’t shared between ranged and melee, so your basic strategy will involve using up all of your mana on ranged attacks, then switching to melee to use endurance while your mana recharges, continuing this loop as need be. It’s not the most complex system ever designed, but it adds a tactical flair to the combat, at least early on. Later, as you acquire more upgrades and focus on a certain playstyle, you’ll probably have enough mana/endurance to only use one attack type, unless you go for a jack-of-all-trades build.
In typical roguelike fashion, your goal is to clear floors of enemies while collecting items and upgrades. Each floor has a boss fight, but it’s only an upgraded version of a standard enemy instead of a unique monster. There are a handful of different floor types, but the only noticeable differences are the color palette and the environmental hazards. Once you make it far enough, even these minor changes go away. Every floor is full of each hazard type, crammed into a big pile. They become your biggest threat because they are the only enemy you can’t kill.
Gameplay – Progression
Instead of a standard skill tree, your potential upgrades will be laid out in a randomized web for you to choose from, generating new branches as you level up. This means min-maxing your character won’t be much of an option, as you’ll be forced to occasionally take an upgrade you don’t want, simply because you have no good choices left. If Striving for Light was an ARPG, I would find it annoying, but the randomness works well for a roguelike trying to encourage the player to use different skill builds on each run. Unfortunately, while I like the overall concept, the skill web is mostly comprised of simple stat bonuses. There are a handful of more impactful skills, but they are distributed sparingly across the web. The result is that your character gets better in terms of basic stats like damage and speed, but your tactics don’t change much.
Build options are quite limited, with only ranged attacks and melee attacks being viable options. Technically, you can go for a companion-based build, but their poor AI coupled with their low damage output means that they are always inferior to upgrading your own stats. Going for a standard skill build also results in quickly becoming far too powerful. It got to the point where I could kill every enemy on the floor with a single attack (The developer seems to have made a change to fix this post-release, so it may not be relevant anymore).
Similar to many modern roguelikes, there’s a meta-progression system where you can unlock weapons and skills that will show up next time you play. Yet even with everything unlocked, multiple runs feel the same. You only have a few possible builds and they aren’t that different from each other. Most of the weapons fail to stand out as a unique tool for a distinct playstyle. Everything just feels so “samey” that it kills any desire to play again, the cornerstone of any successful roguelike.
Performance
Complaining about performance in an Early Access title isn’t entirely fair, but it’s still important to note. It runs fine at first but clearly isn’t designed for long playthroughs. After your skill web gets large enough, it begins to lag badly, almost to the point of unusability. It also ran abysmally once I was deep into a run, but this was prior to a bug fix, so I can’t confirm that this issue remains.
Verdict
I know it seems like I’m just hating on this indie game to be mean, but really I’m trying to give the developer honest feedback. I like the core framework and I think it has a lot of potential, but in its current state, it has too many flaws to recommend it.
