Mana Spark Demo

Roguelikes are simple in many regards, but they are anything but that when it comes to survival. Most of the gameplay revolves around being able to take on enemy after enemy without succumbing to permadeath, while the combat itself is unforgiving and usually not very technical. In short, it’s more about being lucky than it is about being skilled, although that’s not true in every case.

Mana Spark is a retro roguelike in which your purpose is as simple as it is in every other game in the genre: survive and find treasure. There’s no intricate story to keep you guessing, no carefully-crafted characters to stick with you for years to come, and no tricky combat system you need to get familiar with. In short, you should be able to start dying from the first minutes of gameplay.

In the land of Mana Spark, humans are the minority, and you play as one of them. Everyone else is either stronger or more numerous, which is why the confrontations are usually unfair. Thus, monsters tend to cooperate in order to bring you down, which makes it that much tougher to stay alive. Since you only have a bow at your disposal, attacking them is as difficult as defending yourself.

Each lever contains three main ingredients: monsters, treasure chests and levers. The latter are used to open the door to the next level, which means that you kind of have to explore the entire dungeon most of the time. Thankfully, the levels are randomly generated, so the exploration part shouldn’t be too repetitive, even if you die very often. The items you find are pretty random as well, as are the enemies you encounter.

Speaking of items, they seem to permanently bind to you and automatically apply their effects on you, whether it’s higher bow damage, additional speed or poisonous arrows. Each one of them makes it easier to overcome the mobs, but it’s also important that you keep moving at all times and avoid the enemy attacks as well. It’s not easy, but at least you can dash out of harm’s way with the press of a button.

In the end, Mana Spark shows a lot of promise, even if there’s nothing very original about the recipe it follows. However, the fact that you can only use a bow makes things much tougher, although this can turn into frustration at some point. You can support the developer by voting for Mana Spark on Steam Greenlight.