Darkened Skye | DJcube

You are Skye of Lylora, Recruited as Hero #1 in the Battle against Evil

NA release: 12th November 2002
EU release: 30th May 2003
JP release: N/A
Developer: Boston Animation
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (NA), TDK Mediactive (EU)
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

Set in a fantasy land where magic has vanished and colour is seen as an act of rebellion, you play as Skye, a dwentil herder that ends up finding a mysterious object that lets her cast magic. She gets chased by the evil forces of Necroth but ends up meeting a few friendly voices, such as a sarcastic gargoyle named Draak. The adventure takes her though a few realms as she tries to restore the Great Rainbow to bring back magic by collecting five prisms.

In terms of gameplay, Darkened Skye is serviceable. I had to rejig the controls to be more comfortable but, as this is pretty much a direct PC port (you can really feel it), you can remap everything. You have a melee attack which seems to pick a random animation to play, or you can use magic, some of which are direct attacks, others are buffs or ways to mess with your opponents. You get access to a lot of spells by the end and there’s a lot of flexibility in how you fight with it.

The game is a fairly typical adventure game. Make your way through fairly linear worlds, keeping an eye out for objects that you need to solve puzzles. Some of these are straightforward, but there are a few areas where it’s difficult to see what you need to interact with. There were some button combination puzzles that I solved via trial and error because I never figured out the clues. But there are a few clever ones, like one where you need an instrument that plays a flat E, so need to get forks that play E and squash the instrument.

What makes Darkened Skye enjoyable, though, is its dialogue. Both Skye and Draak are sassy and sarcastic, yet it’s pulled off quite well, as are the fourth-wall breaking jokes. Even the notes in Skye’s journal are worth reading. I found the story itself to be rather intriguing and wanted to see what happened next, and the game has a really cheerful charm that makes it all a lot of fun. It does fall slightly into the problem that pointing out dumb things in video games and still doing them still means that it’s doing dumb video game stuff, but the main two voice actors do a good job at selling it. There’s also another aspect of Darkened Skye that adds to the bizarre charm, something absurd that also just oddly works.

You see, the objects in Darkened Skye that provide magical abilities are Skittles. Not bowling pins, the fruit-flavoured sweets. Each of the areas in the game are also based on Skittles adverts from the 90s, such as one where a Chinese man releases birds from cages and causes a rainbow to rain and cause Skittles to fall from the sky. In Darkened Skye, you need to find and save these birds. It’s quite baffling how a licensed game like this could be made, but the answer was quite simple.

Simon & Schuster got licenses from Mars to produce M&Ms and Skittles games. After some successful M&Ms games, they asked one of their producers, Elizabeth Braswell, to come up with a game. She initially asked her boss to be sacked instead, but realised that there was no stipulation to the type of game. So she wrote a script for a comedy fantasy game and it was approved, barring the removal of some mild swearing, one joke and (strangest of all) for all snakes to be removed. The Skittles aspect really adds to the absurdity, especially the expansion upon some short adverts as a basis for a game. It’s definitely one of the more interesting sweet-based games.

Fun

To off-handedly dismiss this title as just another marketing gimmick would be a mistake. While it is true that the recurring theme of Skittles is touched upon, the development team had the insight to work the product tie-in in a respectable (if that is possible) way that actually fits quite snugly into the overall theme of the game. The sometimes-awkward gameplay dynamics and annoying platforming requirements can harsh your buzz at times but on the whole you’ll find this game to be 1part annoying and 3parts entertaining, so, you do the math. At the very least snuggle up with a bag of Skittles and give this game a rental.
The Cookie Snatcher, WorthPlaying

Remake or remaster?

A re-release would be good.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Darkened Skye.