Stay Alight! Review

Stay Alight! is a physics-based puzzle game where players take control of Mr. Bulb, an anthropomorphized light bulb tasked with exterminating monster-microbes. Structurally, the game quite obviously takes cues from wildly successful predecessors like Angry Birds. However, the visual style and puzzle design of Stay Alight! makes it a unique enough experience to keep things interesting.

At the start of the game, players are given the briefest glimpse into the state of the game world. There's pollution, and the moster-microbes inhabit the pollution, so it's up to a race of lightbulb people--and Mr. Bulb in particular--to defeat these monsters by throwing light spheres at them. Although progression through the game reveals a little more about this world as players progress, the core of Stay Alight! is really about throwing light projectiles to clear stages of monster-microbes to progress to the next stage.

In each level, Mr. Bulb appears in a designated area and cannot move, and players need to adjust the angle and power of Mr. Bulb's throwing arm to hit all enemy monster-microbes on screen. While this starts out as a simple exercise of trajectory estimation, the game quickly begins introducing exploding barrels, breakable boxes, and other environmental elements that either need to be exploited or avoided to successfully progress to the next stage.

All of the twists and turns in Stay Alight!'s puzzle design all seem smartly implemented, making seeing each new puzzle element an added bonus for progression. However, the main problem with Stay Alight! is that the controls and physics can be frustrating at times, making progression through the game unnecessarily painful. That being said, Stay Alight! is still perfectly playable and enjoyable in its own right.