Sparklite

[rynling]

Sparklite is a Link to the Past style 16-bit top-down rougelike. Your home base is on a floating island, and each descent plops you down onto a procedurally generated world where you gather resources for some purpose I don't fully understand. To upgrade your equipment, I think? Probably.

The game looks cute and seems charming, but it suffers from Bad Switch Port Disease. Specifically, you can't walk to the left. Instead you have to do a weird maneuver where you turn right two to four times depending on where you want to go. It's very difficult to control, and I don't think this was intentional.

I'm going to have to put Sparklite into the same category as Airoheart, meaning that there were no quality control checks on the Nintendo Switch version. I understand that porting games isn't simple, but "you can't walk to the left" seems like it would raise some sort of flag. Oh well.

The good news is that a frustrated post-Sparklite search on the Nintendo Switch store taught me that a sequel to Blossom Tales recently came out. (Hooray!) I already started playing, and it's a joy. A very simple joy that perhaps wears its A Link to the Past influences a bit too shamelessly, but a joy nonetheless.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

Ahhh Sparklite!! I also played it on Switch and remember similar jank controls. I never finished it, though, because the final boss made me ragequit incredibly hard (it's one of those bosses with phases and if you die during one of the later ones, you just need to replay all of it and I just... don't have the spoons to be angry at video games in my spare time lolsob). ANYHOW, definitely enjoy it! It's super cute and fun, especially in the earlier parts of the game.

[rynling]

So the controls worked for you? Hmmmm... maybe it's just the Switch Lite that's not working for me. I'll try to play it with the pro controller on the regular Switch, then.

If this fix also works for Disco Elysium, though, I might try that first. Fingers crossed!