SPARK is a 2D puzzle game disguised as a platformer. You are a defenseless robot with three abilities: move, jump and spark. If you haven't already guessed, sparking is the game's unique selling point. By aiming a beam of...erm, something...at certain walls and pressing LMB, you can teleport to that section of the wall. Gravity will then change to orient itself to you so that spiked blocks and things of the like will fall on you if you're not careful. For some reason, when you, a robot, are killed by spikes, the game makes a rather squishy sound more suited to the comically timed death of an organic being, but I digress.
Maybe I'm just impatient or maybe I've been so conditioned by typical platformers that I think platforming should always be fast-paced, but I do find something a bit dreadful about SPARK's pacing. It's not so much that the movement speed is too slow or that stuff doesn't happen frequently enough, it's just that SPARK really really wants you to think of it as a puzzle game, so it punishes any and all thoughtlessness. If you teleport somewhere without thinking of why you're teleporting there first, you're going to get squished and you're going to have to restart the level. For this reason, I didn't make it past the second stage.
Other than that, everything's fine. The hitboxes are a bit too big, and I instinctively hate any game that kills you for touching the perfectly safe side of a spike rather than just for falling upon pointy death; both of these design choices and others, such as your sprite lingering for just long enough to be squished after teleporting somewhere, do make the game a bit more frustrating than I think it needs to be. Honestly, if there had just been more frequent checkpoints, I might have had the patience to play the game all the way through. It's about time game designers learned this valuable lesson, so let me give a word of advice to any prospective designers who may be reading this: gamers don't like to do the same thing more than once. There are plenty of other ways to punish our mistakes that don't involve invalidating our successes as well. Use them.
That's all I got for today. Until next time, stay sparky.
Links
BZZT: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26704
