Sparklite (2019) [PS4]

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

-Epictetus

Sparklite wastes no time getting started so neither will this Sparklite review.

The game begins, as many stories do, on a dark and stormy night. Engineer, inventor, and action heroine Ada and her robot assistant are persecuted by the buffering winds in their airship, until something goes really wrong. Their craft begins to fall apart and it plummets to the ground. Ada miraculously survives but her pet robo is lost among the wreckage.

She’s (crash)landed on Geodia, an ever-shifting realm of constant flux. The Fracture is a regular occurrence that literally shakes up the landscape, rearranging it upon every visit, stranding its inhabitants in an unexplored cartographer’s nightmare.

Besides that, all is not right in Geodia. An evil self-titled Baron is sucking the planet dry of its most precious resource: sparklite, which serves as a kind of currency and power source. Mining too much Sparklite has drained the life force of the planet, tearing chasms into its deserts, infesting its forests with monsters, and poisoning its lakes with acid.

However, high above it all is a floating city, powered by pure sparklite, clean and renewable energy that will run longer than the lifetime of the stars. Upon inevitably losing her way and fainting on Geodia, Ada is picked up by the friendly residents of the floating city. Her wounds are mended and she’s tasked with defeating the agents of the Baron selfishly tearing the sparklite from the planet before it is too late.

Sparklite is a game that will feel immediately familiar to many, I assert. Everything from its trendy indie teals and diamonds (seriously, what is up with indies and diamonds?) to its rogue-lite procedurally generated maps and its action-adventure mechanics to its environmentalist message. Though there is perhaps a clearer picture of a solution in that message (however oversimplified) than we’ve typically been treated to: clean and renewable energy sources versus greedy businesses over-consuming the planet’s bounties. It’s easy to see where corporations equal bad but at least the game doesn’t answer the problem by solving it with a Black Materia Meteor to the face.

In other words, the game doesn’t posit extinction. Whew!

Anyway, the degree to which it will bother you that Sparklite seems familiar is, of course, up to you. You might not even be accustomed to indies like this sporting random maps and gorgeous pixel art. If that’s the case, you’re in for what I think is a normative and exemplary experience, as a taste test of what this sort of game is like.

If you’ve played many indies before, likely you’ll find a handful of good ideas in Sparklite but nothing too new. Now let’s burrow into the heart of this beast.

The 8-bit Review

 Visuals: 8/10

A few graphical errors can’t, particularly those hanging on the edge of the screen, can’t derail the overall visual splendor of Sparklite’s world. Curiously brown-tinted, there’s a warm earthen quality to the graphics, grounding it in sensations of coziness and comfort. Whimsical character models beam with personality and the boss designs are particularly impressive with all of their moving parts.

Amid the indie pixel art scene, Sparklite shines bright. It is a beautiful callback to the 16-bit era.

Audio: 8/10

Californian composer Dale North provides a suitable soundtrack for Sparklite. Considering the regions of the game need to be frequently revisited, I sense there was a special kind of attention paid to the music to ensure it was pleasant and not grating to listen to. As such, its melodies don’t repeat too quickly and there’s a sense of ambiance to each track, though this perhaps contributes to the music not being as memorable as they might have been.

Still, the soundtrack leans toward positive, not negative, emotions. That’s a plus, especially with the Vinelands that serves as your entrance to Geodia every time you go on an adventure. Next to the floating city, it is the place Ada visits most often. Fortunately, then, the music is enjoyable.

Other regions come off as much more musically subtle. One of my favorite tracks was from the Goldenwoods, a region to the east. It fits right in with the long tradition of elegant, haunting, mysterious forest music.

 Gameplay: 7/10

The floating hub serves as your headquarters between excursions to Geodia, and it features several outlets that help equip Ada for adventure. Many areas in the hub can be expanded upon by spending sparklite.

The medical bay has a shop where you can purchase health, defense, and energy upgrades in the form of patches. There’s an inventor’s shop where Ada can reverse engineer artifacts she’s discovered in Geodia, filling out her arsenal of tools. There’s a widget spot where you can snag a consumable tool (randomly populated) before heading out. There’s a miniature amphitheater where you can collect Beats, tiny songbirds, as a kind of side quest.

More becomes available as you “unlock” new NPCs by encountering them in Geodia, which is an exciting mechanic to see. I just wish there was more to it. For instance, two NPCs named Margo and Pogo are lost in Geodia. If you can find both of them on a single trip, they’ll offer you a map of one of the regions and return to the hub. They are, however, only one of less than a handful of unlockable NPCs.

From the floating hub, Ada descends to Geodia, primarily to the Vinelands. This initial region connects to each of the four other regions: the Goldenwoods to the east, the Acid Bogs to the south, the Shifting Sands to the west, and Titan’s Ridge to the north. These are each accessed in the exact order that I’ve described them.

The regions, as mentioned, are procedurally generated, though you’ll become familiar with specific screens, the monsters and the particular secrets that inhabit them. If and when Ada runs out of health, she’s returned to the hub and can cash in all the sparklite she’s collected for upgrades, then it’s back to the random realm of Geodia once again. This loop is common in rogue-lites, and likely where Sparklite got its name.

I had a tendency toward thinking that while the NES era is criticized for games featuring artificial longevity thanks to cruel difficulty, it’s not much different here with today’s rogues. After exploring every nook and cranny of the Vinelands for the eighth time (Sparklite has a slow start before you build up enough cash to cash out on upgrades), I found myself wondering why I had to do the same thing over and over again. Even procedurally generated worlds can’t mask that feeling when it becomes transparent. Isn’t this still just longevity padding?

That may be a larger game design issue than Sparklite can, or should have to, bear.

A few quality-of-life upgrades might be in order. For instance, sometimes I wanted to return to Geodia, especially when I had enough sparklite to afford the pricier upgrades, but as far as I could tell the only way to do so was to run out of health, and filling into the same pit thirty times to get there seems a little silly.

Also, I could wish that I could easily swap between the patch board and my inventory of patches without having to tap all the way to the spot where I want to be. An upgraded dash was something I expected, given the slow running pace and short dash distance Ada possesses.

Actually, as far as upgrades go, it’s easy enough to achieve them all by the end of the game if you’re a completionist. A super boss and therefore a little extra motivation to push for every last upgrade would’ve been cool, as long as more upgrades, period. I expected these could be added later, but as it is, even something like Ada’s inventing/reverse engineering abilities seem like an underutilized idea: I could wish there was more opportunity to make decisions in the tinkering process, come up with my own gear, or simply discover more artifacts down in Geodia beyond the basics.

Sparklite really does have a handful of good ideas. There are also several known issues due to be patched, evidently, by launch. It is, ultimately, however, a pretty short game even with the procedurally generated worlds.

 Narrative: 5/10

We’ve already addressed the themes of Sparklite above, a pragmatic approach to environmentalism. What at first seems like a story-heavy game ends up quickly becoming a gameplay-heavy game, and that’s fine.

Sparklite’s story is little more than a premise, though that perhaps fails its more interesting narrative features; can you believe it includes myth/history about the origins of life on Geodia in such a short span of playtime? I’d have loved to explore the idea of the Founders and their artifacts much more, but I remind myself that these ideas are the backdrop and Sparklite chooses to set its roguish gameplay front and center.

Where this approach pays off the least, though, is with the final confrontation with the Baron. An underwhelming ultimate form boss fight leads to a brief conclusion, and that’s that. There are no characters that grow with Ada. Ada herself doesn’t really grow, though we understand more of her history as we go along, so it’s reasonable that this is the end that best fits this game. It is another area in which I found myself asking for more than the game, teasingly, intended to deliver.

Still, the world and its lore, however minimal, are intriguing. It’s better to be left wanting more than to be left wanting less, I guess!

Accessibility: 8/10

There was only one thing I wish I knew sooner: you can stack health, defense, and energy patches on your patch board, creating stronger versions of each patch without taking up so much space on the board. If an NPC mentioned this directly, I missed it, but I could wish there was a clearer tutorial.

Beyond that, playing Sparklite is cake. Not all tools are as useful as others, and you do need to figure out for yourself what to do with a few of them. There actually aren’t a ton of tutorials in the game, but this isn’t a hard beast to tame, anyway.

 Challenge: 4/10

Speaking of difficulty, Ada quickly becomes OP after a few upgrades, making the earliest parts of the game the most difficult to get on top of and the main boss fights the biggest hurdle. Actually, the first boss was harder with under-equipped Ada than was the last boss when over-equipped.

Sparklite does not borrow rogueish elements of insane difficulty, and though dying is frequent, I never thought the difficulty design was overwhelming, or even demanding. You can take your time and explore at your leisure, and even come across helpful recovery items. As such, it’s a good introductory action-adventure to the field of rogue-lites.

Still haven’t found all these little guys.

 Uniqueness: 4/10

Sparklite comes short of being entirely derivative, but there wasn’t a whole lot in the game that I thought was entirely new, either. It seems like a combination of several popular ideas, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It does, for example, have the focus and brevity of an indie, and that made it a great palette cleanser for me.

Personal: 6/10

Overall, I enjoyed my time spent with Sparklite. It was a light and lighthearted experience. I feel a tinge of guilt asking for more from it, but it had some ideas that were very intriguing to me. Reverse engineering could’ve definitely been a centerpiece gameplay concept, though it really only occurs just over a handful of times in the game.

All in all, Red Blue Games’ Sparklite shows potential, if not for future updates to the game itself, then with the development studio in charge. We’d like to thank Red Blue Games, Merge, and Maple Whispering for a copy of their game in exchange for this honest Sparklite review.

Aggregated Score: 6.1

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.