[PAX East 2019] Sparklite might be the rogue-like Zelda that we’ve been waiting for

Sparklite has an interesting premise: It takes what we love about games like A Link to the Past and Crystalis (still a fantastic adventure!) and throws in rouge-like and procedurally generated elements that put replayability at the forefront. In fact, Even a short demo is enough to pique my resource-hunting interest for the full release.

The premise behind the game deals with our mission to find our lost robot friend. We discover that, by no coincidence, the world is fracturing constantly, thanks to all of its sparklite mysteriously being drained away. Sparklite is a sort of currency in the game’s world, and is used to both buy things and craft upgrades. This also provides an interesting explanation for why the world changes every time we die and are resuscitated: we’re in a coma long enough for the land to go through another fracture. The only constant is that there are specific important treasures and bosses in certain locations, but those are also able to be shifted around a bit.

We start off fairly weak and need to collect enough of the resource to upgrade our health and weapons, and improve the floating town that we’re reborn in after each “death.” It has that Zelda feel, for sure, but we realize very quickly that we need to improve ourselves quickly to be able to take on the more challenging bosses.

The PAX demo has us running around the shifting world to collect the material. This can be found by beating up enemies or chopping down large plant-like growths in the overworld. Because it’s an Action RPG, there’s plenty of grass to cut and boulders to break, but they currently don’t give you anything in return; the developers reiterate that they don’t want players running around to go after things that don’t have actual meaning in the game, as it then becomes more about harvesting and grinding than exploring. And, if we hit a wall where we can’t find enough of the sparklite easily, jumping into a chasm enough times sends us back into our floating town without penalizing us. We don’t lose the sparklite we’ve collected. Thus, we can do that as often as we need to in case we want to improve certain aspects of our gear, entering an entirely rearranged world below on our next trip down.

The demo climaxes in a boss fight in a forest with what looks like a giant mechanical lumberjack. It’s certainly a difficult and surprisingly complex fight, but with a little bit of pattern-recognition it can be solvable, albeit we need enough health to make it through. I’m curious, though, what death during these boss fights will lead to — will we get zipped up into the clouds as the world resets again, or find some easier way to reengage the boss later?

We’ll find out later this year. Red Blue Games’ Sparklite is due on consoles, PC & Mac this Autumn.