Game:

Steven Universe: Attack the Light (2015)

Duration: 17:15

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32

Yeah! Look at that running time! I bet you thought this was going to be a SHORT game just because it's on a mobile platform! Not so! ...oh... oh no... what have I gotten myself into?! (Though, to be fair, MOST time is spent in battle rather than on devious layouts.)

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Indigo Caves
Stage 1-4:

So this stage introduces the "puzzle wall"... that... is really more of a "find all these objects" wall... so... that's not too much different from the keys and light barriers (why would a light barrier open with a physical key?), but it functions as the next logical step up. That said, it's more of an indication that things are about to get a lot less linear up in here. Instead of one dead end end and a backtrack, we get branching paths... and... in this case, a backtrack... for each! ... ... ...yeah, I know, but baby steps, okay? Your design senses should be tingling, because this is fresh out of tutorialsville and is quite the indication of what we can expect going forward.

In case you felt let down that we were preemptively instructed to take out the rubble shield of this... weird little guy... with the rocks... shielding him... with no opportunity to learn for ourselves what's going on with him, Garnet can't possibly disarm TWO of the little blighters with one turn's worth of Star Points, though, so rest assured that we'll be forced to see what its attack is like eventually.

This goes along with something I mentioned last time about threat assessment... if it stands to imminently hurt you... hurt it first! If it's not posing much of a threat, it can probably wait. An interesting inversion to this principle is based on how enemies in Attack the Light are MOST dangerous when they're in a group.

However, you'll also notice from time to time that GIANT versions of common enemies will show up. These will have beefed up stats across the board, making them much bigger threats than normal (especially if their pint-sized versions were already a threat), but you MAY want to avoid sinking all your efforts into trying to defeat them before all other enemies despite this. That's because their defense and HP are SO much greater that you might struggle to do much damage without wasting all your initiative each turn... so, on the flip side, if you single them out and make them the ONLY thing hitting you, you can actually minimize their impact by making them only capable of damaging you moderately once per turn, instead of on top of the rest of the enemies' smaller damage possibly leading to a poofing. Then, you can work on dropping its defenses and going to town. (Still, be prepared for Pearl's attacks to do 1 point of damage even so.)

So, I didn't bring it up last time... but this game has... BADGES! ...which are exactly like and totally not creatively infringing upon their use in Mario-based RPGs, providing massively useful passive effects and an extra level of customization.

Actually, as conditions change, different enemies are afoot, and your team members get stronger, you'll often find it important to pass the badges around. For instance, a staple for much of the game will be the Ember Badge, which lets attacking or blocking have the chance to impart a burn on an enemy, providing extra defense-ignoring damage to them every turn. (But no reduction in attack! Darn!)

Its usefulness is directly proportional to how often a Gem will attack. At the start of the game, Pearl won't do much damage at all, and Amethyst is a big waste of Star Points, so Garnet will cause burns more often. Later on, Pearl's efficiency will edge out Garnet's attack strength AND provide twice as many opportunities to apply a burn. Even later than that, Amethyst's ability to hit all enemies at once will make for an even more lucrative possibility to cause widespread debilitation. Enemies will tend to attack the gem with the lowest HP, but other than that, it's not exactly easily manipulated in your favor... or advisable to try to game the system by gambling with the team's Harmony like that.

One thing that I'm pretty sure we haven't seen is... bats can FLY. I'll pause for your shocked gasps. When they fly higher, they become untargetable by conventional means AND launch a stronger attack on their next turn. (This further cements its position as the thus-far light prism creature apex predator.)

However, with a bit of logic, you can still hit such targets... out-of-reach aerial targets are vulnerable to Amethyst's whip or a Spear Throw (if you hit, anyway), just as underground targets like burrowed moles can be knocked to the surface by Shield Breaker's shockwave.

As the game script transparently tells us... there are also going to be SOME things we can't do in our first visit to certain locations... specifically, we have the notion of Red Gems. There will be red "puzzle" doors all over the game that will only open with the aid of a gem that's not native to that area. Bummer. There goes the streak of 100% completion runs on the first try, too.

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