Sparklite (Xbox One)

Genre names are important to helping people have a basic idea what a game will be like in only a few words. When the rogue-like genre started to become popular in the early 2010s, most people knew it meant a game with randomized area layouts, random upgrades available per run, and a permadeath system that sends the player back to the start to have a somewhat different experience in their next attempt. However, since the genre was named for a specific game, people felt it had to be much closer in style to Rogue, and the term rogue-lite came into fashion. The issue with it became that what differentiates a true rogue-like from a rogue-lite is incredibly subjective, meaning most people knew what you meant if you called a game like The Binding of Isaac a rogue-like but rogue-lite meant it didn’t meet their mostly arbitrary personal definition of what differentiates the terms. I’ve avoided using the term rogue-lite entirely for this reason, but I do feel like, if I ever needed to point at an example of one, I would probably pick Sparklite as the poster child. Not only does its name already imply it’s trying to be a rogue-lite, but its integration of the three cornerstone features of the genre seems to have been done lightly, meaning those genre aspects do not define the experience as much as a typical rogue-like is defined by them.

Sparklite’s adventure begins when the young heroine Ada finds her airship has suffered a catastrophic failure. Forced to fend for herself in the wilds with nothing but a wrench, Ada is soon overwhelmed by the monsters of the world below, but before she can truly meet her end, she is whisked up into the clouds to a refuge in the sky where she learns things are far more dire than they first seemed. The land of Geodia derives most of its energy from a force called Sparklite, but the Baron and his titans have begun to mine the land beyond its limitations, the area itself constantly rearranging itself due to the faults they trigger as corrupted creatures attack anyone they see. However, by collecting Sparklite for the people in the sky, Ada can build herself into a more capable warrior, making repeated trips down to the land below to build up her power, overthrow the titans, and hopefully return Geodia to its former glory.

The reshuffling land is how Sparklite justifies its top-down overworld constantly changing its shape, the layout of Geodia shuffling around after each death. Certain things stay in the same general areas though. The grass land is always your starting spot, and areas like the acidic bog, autumnal forest, and arid desert are always found in the same directions from that central area. While each of them have their own associated creatures, hazards, and titan boss, the different screens the action takes place across aren’t quite as varied as you’d hope in something with procedurally generated layouts. The different sections that get rearranged seem to come from a very small and increasingly familiar pool of options, meaning that even after two or three shuffles you’ll immediately recognize a place despite it connecting to other sections in a different way. This doesn’t really make navigation all that interesting and the shuffling feels rather arbitrary because of how samey sections feel so quickly, especially since the hazards and enemies aren’t too tough to handle.

There is a decent progression of enemy types at least. Things begin with simple wildlife and goblins you can easily defeat with your basic attack, but later areas start to get aggressively diving wasps, elementals who can attack you from afar, speedy creatures who blow up when they reach you, and sturdy foes who can launch homing missiles or leap onto you before you can whittle their health down all the way. Fighting most of the creatures in the main world is essentially optional though. Very few outright block your path, the rewards for killing them are usually just a pittance of Sparklite, and it’s not until later they start sealing treasure chests with the condition that every enemy on screen dies first. Even then, the treasure chests sealed this way aren’t mandatory, so you can scamper past a lot of things if you don’t feel like fighting them. Area hazards can do a bit better job of area denial like radioactive liquid making things tighter or saws in the ground forcing you to time your movements, so there are ways to make combat the best way to get safely through an area and thus require a bit more engagement with the game mechanics. If there’s something worth grabbing like the fruits on the vines too you probably want to clear out anything hassling you, but by making combat optional in most cases, it does mean fights don’t really have the room to be too involved or exhilarating.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the bosses come in here and help to give you something that requires smart movement, pattern recognition, and an engaging battle. The titans all take on interesting twists to the concept of strip-mining Geodia such as the clear-cutting timber robot and the submersible miner. Your combat options initially consist mostly of just swiping your wrench at things and holding down attack to do a powerful hammer swing, although the hammer option is mostly for solving a very small number of puzzles rather than dealing damage. However, once you start to find blueprints for new inventions, you can add extra abilities to your arsenal. The bow is the first and a ranged option that allows you have more interesting fights with your tougher foes, but you soon get more options both by exploring around for their hiding places and simply progressing the plot. Nothing ever makes it too complex, but most combat feels breezy when it should and the stronger enemies need to be approached with a bit more care. Basically, the fighting fills the world well enough even though it certainly needs to make you engage with it more if it wanted to stand out, but scripted fights like the bosses and the furnace runs with multiple floors of foes to clear are enjoyable enough challenges when they do crop up.

Exploration is probably the better part of Sparklite, both in trying to find the way onward and in collecting goodies. Ada can collect new inventions that give her the ability to shoot switches from afar or dive underwater, and a drone that tags along with her gets upgrades to do things like dig up buried items and light up dark areas. It would be easy to make a comparison to The Legend of Zelda, especially since the game’s Steam page does so more than once, and looking around for valuables in this fantasy world certainly feels like it is hitting some of the same notes. The magical Sparklite can be found in many places, but there is definitely a diminished emphasis on puzzles, the shifting world not only not putting many in at all, but these puzzles are often tied completely to randomly appearing items you might not be able to use. Sparklite doesn’t randomize your main upgrades much, instead having widgets that are distributed differently each time. In a run you might keep having the poor luck of finding the heavily situational widget that lights up the rare dark cave, or you might keep getting the healing widget that’s great for helping you punch above your power level. You can get temporary buffs from widget use as well and some are outright attacks, but a baffling decision was made that there would be many explosive rocks blocking puzzles and areas from the player that rely mostly on you finding the widgets that can break them. This means a run might not even give you any due to bad luck and thus certain areas can’t be accessed, and while the game doesn’t take too long to work your way to the final boss if you shoot for it, being cut off from world exploration arbitrarily until the next death feels like padding. These aren’t vital locations, but since looking around for goodies is one of Sparklite’s better points, limiting it in such a manner feels counterintuitive.

Returning again to our rogue-lite elements, when you do die and get pulled back into the sky, it’s time to start building up your strength and resources. You only really lose widgets when pulled back from Geodia, so you can spend Sparklite to build up your refuge with people who can sell you different upgrades and perks. The biggest one has to be the medical center letting you add patches to your wrench, these increasing your health, power, and adding special abilities like being able to locate certain areas of interest no matter how much the world reshuffles. Upgrading patches by combining them is definitely key to closing the power gap between you and later bosses so it is perhaps the best way to spend your Sparklite, but there is also an inventor who helps you build your special gadget blueprints, a man who will let you select a widget from his stock before heading down for another run, and a musician who will give you gifts once you collect enough of the living Beats hidden around the world. Uncovering these little music note creatures is another perk to navigating Sparklite’s world and building up your patch selection does lead to satisfying visible progression, but it is a bit of a shame that you can only revisit the flying city on death or after beating a boss. You can’t rematch bosses either so you have a finite amount of free visits without losing your widgets and reshuffling the world, but the low penalty for death also means killing yourself to go back and build up your power isn’t painful to do. The mostly low impact changes between runs does beg the question of why it couldn’t just be a simple city hub you can walk to and do everything in, but the rogue-lite elements had to crop up somewhere or else this would just be a simple yet somewhat enjoyable action adventure game.

THE VERDICT: Building up your power, exploring the world for helpful items and resources, and facing off with tough enemies or bosses does make Sparklite a decent action adventure title, but the rogue-like elements seem to be implemented in a confused manner. The randomized world is just a minor reshuffling of the same few areas, the randomized widgets have an odd but easily overlooked influence on play, and dying being the only way to get to upgrade stations feels a bit arbitrary. If the focus had been kept on delivering a solid adventure then the experience could have added more character and depth to its world, but by slipping in the bare minimum when it comes to randomized elements, Sparklite misses its chance to become an engaging adventure and instead squeaks by on the moments the exploration and action are unmarred by procedural generation.

And so, I give Sparklite for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. When you enter a new region in Sparklite or just get on a long tear of successes, the awkwardness of the widgets and the unnecessary section shuffling are easily forgotten in favor of plunging into a new territory with novel threats to fight and items to uncover. The new gadgets you build and skills your drone get would be a good fit for a game with more puzzles, and some enemy types would benefit from being locked into a room with a player until they’re defeated, but having the commitment to being a rogue-lite means the areas are designed to be interchangeable and easily repeatable. Boss fights probably shine as much as they do because they’re so consistent in design. Your upgrades paying off in helping you get to the big battles didn’t need randomization to make it challenging and more curated skirmishes could have better pushed you to improve instead of skipping past a lot of baddies. Having widgets or Beats appear semi-randomly could still work, although giving you more consistent access to explosives would make it feel like the world is more open and exciting because access to it isn’t pointlessly gated off due to luck. Essentially, almost every issue comes down to some symptom from being a rogue-lite. Sparklite’s world could be a fun little adventure that twists traditional Zelda ideas with the magic technology the game focuses on, but it feels like a good game was almost made here until its parts got shuffled around to make it into something that is simply average.

Sparklite can still entertain for an evening, its flaws pushed past easily enough and its progression brisk and rewarding enough to sustain play despite the enforced repetition. However, despite becoming my personal example of a game most people could agree satisfies the strange subjective qualities needed to be a rogue-lite, the rogue-lite parts are what holds it back most. While I wouldn’t accuse it of adding in such elements to try and follow a trendy style of game design, it certainly seems confused about how to deliver on its randomized parts. It does show a degree of confidence when there’s nothing random influencing a moment or interaction, so if it had used its better ideas for something more consistent and structured, it could have been more interesting than just a muddled mediocre rogue-like.