Over the years, developers wanting to avoid the mechanical crutch of combat have turned to another tool instead of guns or swords: the flashlight. The humble torch has been the tool of choice in games like Alan Wake and Blair Witch, aiding their protagonists in fending off ghouls in the darkness. But, when a flashlight showed up in BlueTwelve Studio's cat platformer Stray, I realized I had finally had enough.
The flashlight is just a weapon like any other, and I'm tired of pretending it's not. It may be a more thematically appropriate weapon, it's true. Alan Wake is a writer. Ellis Lynch, the protagonist of Blair Witch, is a former cop with PTSD who is joining in a search for a missing person when the game begins. These aren't characters who would be packing heat. But, the presence of the flashlight in Stray feels like a poor fit for a game about being a cat. The game does a smart job of incorporating elements of feline life into the game in other ways. When you encounter a rug or couch post, you can press the left and right triggers to scratch them up with your claws. You can fit through narrow spaces, and cause trouble by knocking precariously perched pots off of shelves. Though the game isn't aiming for Untitled Goose Game's level of chaos-causing, your cat can be a cuddly agent of mayhem at times.
All of this feels well-considered, which makes it puzzling that the game includes the flashlight at all. When I think of ‘cyberpunk cat game’, I expect the cyberpunk elements to add to the experience of being a cat. Jet boots that allow your cat to jump higher, an enhanced sense of smell or more acute hearing. If the game needed a weapon, it could have grown out of the base cat experience; attacks that use your cat's bite, claws, or tail. Instead, we get a flashlight that causes enemies to pop when its light shines on them. It doesn't make a ton of sense, and it doesn't seem to fit the game's theme.
While the flashlight is functionally a weapon, like an AK-47 in Call of Duty, it has little depth in combat and doesn't feel good to use. Stray's combat sections are the only boring bits of an otherwise interesting game. You burn enemies with the torch's light until your flashlight gets overheated, run away as it recharges, then repeat. There's nothing to it. Though I haven't had a chance to check out Eyes in the Dark yet, that recently released action roguelike seems to avoid this trap by leaning into the implications of the flashlight being a weapon. In the trailer, the character gains upgrades for the flashlight that alter the size and shape of the beam, along with the mode of fire.
Eyes in the Dark is an outlier, though. In mos😼t games where the flashlight is forced to do double duty as a weapon, the results are the worst of both worlds. If combat-less games are going to move outside the shadow of their violent siblings, they need a better source of light.