Darkened Skye (GameCube) Review
Taste the rainbow of slop.
~by tankMage (March 2025)
Score: 65/100 (Poor)
Darkened Skye looks like a platforming adventure game with a few RPG mechanics thrown in for good measure, but it’s more like a point and click adventure game with action mechanics if that makes sense. While the idea of fusing these two disparate genres is clever, the execution was completely botched. To put it bluntly, Darkened Skye sucks. The combat is flat and lifeless, the script is a slop bucket of one-liners that become annoying halfway through the game, the platforming mechanics are awful, and (perhaps worst of all) there’s some not so subtle product placement sprinkled liberally through the story.
It would be dishonest of me to pretend I hated everything about this game, so I will admit it had a few endearing qualities. Skye and Draak (her gargoyle sidekick) are funny at times even though their constant quips wear thin after a while. Some of the settings are really creative even late in the game where devs usually slack. I also liked the music, which was fairly exotic and trippy at times.
Finally, I have to point out that it’s OK to like Darkened Skye. Sometimes people take video game reviews very seriously and get all hot under the collar if they don’t like what the critic has to say about game they enjoy. I don’t go into any game wanting to dislike it and I really wanted to like this one, things just didn’t go that way. If you think Darkened Skye is awesome and love it, that’s fine. You’re even welcome to talk about it in the comments or write your own review, just please remember that I didn’t go out of my way to rag on this game because I had a bad day or something.
It’s a freakin’ Skittles commercial!
Advertising in video games is nothing new, even when Darkened Skye came out. Titles like Yo Noid! and Cool Dot are just a few examples of games based on products. It can also be argued that any game based on a movie, toy, comic book, TV show, etc is essentially an advertisement. In general, I have nothing against such games. In fact, some of them are very good.
What annoyed me about the product placement in Darkened Skye is how they went about it. There’s nothing on the cover or box to suggest the game is about magical candies. Even the initial cutscene and first ten minutes of gameplay only hint at the role Skittles plays in the plot. Then you’re suddenly hit with an advertisement that is clumsily jammed into the narrative.
Ironically, I would have been cool with the commercial aspect of the game had been called Skittles Quest or something. Maybe they could have really leaned into the advertisement aspect of the story and made it a self referential joke like the Colonel Sanders dating sim that came out years ago.
Save the Skittles, save the world.
The story is slop and I don’t even want to write about it, but here goes…may as well get it over with quickly. Skittles are magic and some mean bad guy who wants to give himself diabetes took them all. Of course, it’s up to Skye, a dwindle herder with a mysterious past, to save the Skittles. What’s a dwindle you ask? One of the many stupid Muppet wannabes who populate the world of Darkened Skye. Thankfully very few dwindles appear in the game.
Did I mention the heroine is named Skye? Yup, the title is a play on words and just a *ahem* taste of the type of humor the script leans into. Skye and her buddy Draak, a gargoyle, fire off jokes like Rodney Dangerfield on a caffeine binge. While the script can be funny at times, all the jokes get old and the game never knows when to be serious. Comedies have a serious scene or two to make the characters more sympathetic and human. Unfortunately, Darkened Skye didn’t get that memo and makes everything into a joke. This makes it difficult to care about Skye and the story becomes increasingly hollow as it progresses as a result.
The gameplay sucks too.
Darkened Skye is a platformer with puzzle solving and combat worked into it. There is nothing fun and enjoyable about playing this game from a level design and combat perspective. Some of the puzzles are kind of entertaining if you like solving riddles and exploring, but that’s about it.
I’ll start with the platforming. Skye’s jumping mechanic is janky and the game often forces you to bound from platform to platform while monsters take potshots at her. Such situations are made more irritating by the way she just sort of floats when she leaps. Most players will get used to the way Skye jumps, it’s not a hopeless situation, but the cheap gimmick of baddies pounding the orange haired heroine with bullets as she tries to jump along narrow platforms is present until the end of the game. Even worse, players often have little room to maneuver, so survival often comes down to memorization and luck.
Combat is even worse than platforming. Skye has a staff and learns spells as she adventures, cool right? Wrong. The staff becomes very weak about halfway into the game and the spell system is a mess. It’s often hard to tell if Skye is actually hitting her targets with the staff as the visual and audio cues that signal a successful blow are really low key. There are no satisfying thwacks or cool graphics to indicate a hit, instead a few sparks shoot from the victim and the player will hear a dull thud that is also used when she hits walls. There’s also no strategy to melee combat, you just run up to the target and start swinging. Skye can perform special attacks with her staff, but how to pull them off reliably was something I never really figured out and they suck anyway.
I have to lead into my review of the magic system with some praise. Skye learns a lot of spells and some are really cool. Spells allow the player to float, shrink to fit into small spaces, and see hidden clues to name just a few of Skye’s abilities. Some of the offensive spells were also kind of fun to use.
That said, the spell system was implemented very badly. Skye learns spells automatically as she moves from area to area and it is easy to miss or forget about them. On top of that, she needs various colored Skittles to use a spell as well as magic power, which regenerates on its own. Skittles have to be slotted into the spell for her to use it, which forces the player to constantly fiddle with the inventory in order to equip a spell. The game is pretty stingy when it comes to giving the player Skittles, so there are rarely enough of them to equip more than one or two spells until later on.
Once you have a spell equipped, it is fairly easy to cycle through them with the D-Pad, but firing off offensive spells isn’t all that fun. Skye runs out of magic pretty fast, so the player has to pop a potion or wait for her energy to recharge. On top of that, some spells don’t connect with the target unless the reticle is locked into them and the reticle is unreliable as hell. Fire fights with long range enemies are really common and the earlier stages of Darkened Skye become a slog due to the crappy spell system. Skye gets better projectile spells that do not rely on the lock on system later on, which is good as the game would be truly miserable to play otherwise.
The puzzle aspect of the game turned out a little better than its other elements, but not by much. Darkened Skye takes after point and click adventures where players have to trade or find items to use in certain spots more than it does Legend of Zelda. Most of the puzzles are fairly obvious and some can just be solved through brute force. However, a few of them were fairly devious and I had to refer to a guide to figure them out. All in all, the puzzle solving and exploration aspects of the game are its high points, for what it’s worth.
Who’s the boss?
The bosses in Darkened Skye warrant their own little corner of this review and not for good reasons. Every so often Skye will meet a boss. It may be a dragon, a mysterious villain in a suit of armor, or just a larger version of a regular monster. Regardless of what form the various bosses took, all of them felt lacking.
Once again, there really wasn’t any strategy to fighting the bosses. On rare occasions players will need to switch out spells, but running, shooting, and tossing back a life potion when needed is more than enough to defeat most bosses.
The final two bosses stand out in my memory for better or worse… well mostly for the worse. In both cases players have to do something special to defeat them. The next to last boss isn’t too bad once you figure out the trick, but the final boss is a total pain in the Skittles. Worse yet, I didn’t feel like I beat the final boss as a result of skill and diligence, it felt more like dumb luck.
Good music and voice acting, bad sound effects.
I really liked the music. It didn’t always fit the mood of the game, but most of the songs are good nonetheless. However, one of the songs was really, really weird; I think the composer ate too many Skittles that day.
One really interesting aspect of this game is its voice acting. I ran across a rumor that Linda Larkin, who voiced Princess Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin, played Skye while I was doing some homework on the development process. According to IMDB, she really did voice Skye, which is kind of crazy. In general, the voice acting is really good, so I guess we know where the budget went.
The sound effects were annoying and far too loud. They often drowned out the dialogue and music. It’s possible to adjust the SF volume in the options, which helps a lot. Even so, I’m not sure why the sound engineer made the raucous cries of some of the monsters so loud in the first place, maybe he got into the Skittles stash too?
Maybe you should play this game.
I’m becoming an advocate of playing bad games. After completing a lot of great games the past few years, I was starting to get spoiled and bored. A few days of suffering through Darkened Skye made me really appreciate the next game I started playing and I realized that we need to slog through the garbage so we can fully savor the classics. It’s kind of like eating your vegetables so you can have desert or going to work so you can pay bills…hmmm maybe that last example isn’t great. At any rate, this game is kind of good for a laugh if you go into it knowing it’s a train wreck, so give it a try then treat yourself to something better. Hey, you may even like it.
Thanks for reading my Darkened Skye (GameCube) review!
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