Sparklite is an action RPG from Red Blue Games. I played the PC version, but the game is also available on the Switch, Mac and PlayStation 4. Don’t let the gameplay loop fool you, Sparklite isn’t a roguelike. I made the mistake of thinking I was loading into a roguelike during my first few hours with the game and I was left confused and a little disappointed. When I figured out that Sparklite wasn’t meant to be a roguelike, it made much more sense…though I still ended up a little disappointed in the end.
The way Sparklite presents gameplay involves the protagonist, Ada, waking up/reviving in a town that is floating in the sky. After spending a little bit of time augmenting her abilities, Ada descends from the town and into a labyrinthine, continuously changing, world. While down on the ground, Ada can defeat enemies and collect treasure. When she dies she loses all limited-use items and is sent back to the city in the sky to spend whatever sparklite (the game’s currency) she found. When ready, Ada heads back down to the ground to repeat the process again.
So, with that kind of gameplay loop you can see how I thought this was a roguelike at first.
Eventually I realized that the world wasn’t entirely randomly generated after noticing some specific areas appear in every run I made. The game told me early on that earthquakes change the world, so I figured that was their lore-friendly way of explaining randomly generated environments. It was more so the way the game was letting me know the world scrambles around a little bit each time I venture into it.
The game’s scrambled world consists of five zones: a grass-and-fields zone, an eternally autumn zone, a swamp zone, a desert zone and a mountain zone. Each zone stays anchored to one section of the world map; so for example, the autumn zone will always be the eastern-most zone. Each zone features a boss to defeat and an ability temple to complete. Zones are only accessible after acquiring certain abilities from defeating bosses.
Each environment also features unique enemies. The enemy variety was may favorite part of the game. Each monster must be dealt with a certain way and I enjoyed learning how to efficiently deal with each type of monster and also being surprised by a new monster that would appear in a new zone. It wasn’t until near the end of the game when Sparklite lost some of that momentum and started using the same-monster-but-more-HP gimmick to artificially inflate the difficulty a bit.
Not that an increased HP pool would have made much of a difference to the game’s difficulty. Sparklite is an easy game. I had no trouble beating the game. The boss fights only took a few tries, (I defeated Scubert, the third boss, on my first try), and by the time I reached the final boss, Ada was so strong that the final confrontation was a breeze.
That final boss fight left me a bit disappointed. As I said, Sparklite did a great job designing enemies that were fun to discover and defeat. (Minor spoiler:) Sadly, half of the final boss fight simply involved the villain summoning in the same type of minions I’ve been fighting the entire game. The pixel art design for the final boss was really awesome, yet there I was, beating up the same gremlins I’d been slicing apart since the first zone.
Apart from the neat enemy designs, I struggled to find much uniqueness in Sparklite. It wasn’t a bad game, but it failed to excite me beyond enjoying the pixel art. The story wasn’t particularly interesting, the gameplay didn’t give me any unique-to-Sparklite experiences and the abilities I unlocked didn’t feel that special. One of the final abilities, for example, simply allows you to swim.
Sparklite also fumbled a little during my playthrough. At one point I entered into a whirlpool and the game deposited me into a cavern that Ada then glitched through the floor and fell out of view. I had to restart the game. Unfortunately, because the game functions like a roguelike (even though it isn’t a roguelike), there are no saves until you die, so I lost all of the collected sparklite I had gathered.
Collecting sparklite was tedious because Ada needed so much of it to upgrade anything. It’s boring having to bash caterpillars, cut down trees and suck up mud to process into sparklite-containing geodes over and over again. You don’t have to upgrade any of your abilities, but then fighting the enemies can get tedious, especially considering you’ll be running in and out of the same areas each time you play.
Even the enemy-filled mines that you can find in each zone were laughably boring. Near the end of the game I entered one mine and was met with a room where I simply had to run over to a switch, step on it, and run out of the room. I didn’t even have to fight anything, the enemies in the room were stationary turrets, so I would have had to stand still, right in front of one, to take damage.
By the time I reached the last zone I was just running by the enemies and looking for where the boss cave was. I was bored with Sparklite and just wanted it to be over. Considering the final boss fight trapped me with the same monsters I was already bored with fighting, it felt like the developers got bored by the time they reached the end of the game too.
Sparklite was reviewed using a retail copy provided by the publisher.
