Cold Fanta

There’s something that happens when pixels hit the screen. Some people got over it. I didn’t.

I’ve played enough 3D games to understand why they matter. Witcher 3 is genuinely good. Mario 64 is a masterpiece. Mass Effect works. Ocarina of Time is genuinely epic. But they never moved me the way pixels do. When the SNES generation ended and everything shifted to PlayStation, Dreamcast, N64, I felt something die. I could tell then—everything would get worse, less soulful, less alive. It did.

The indie developers never stopped feeling this way. They understood that you don’t need photorealism for fantasy to come alive. Stardew Valley proved it. Owlboy proved it. Terraria proved it. The best games ever made were pixels: Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, A Link to the Past—just untouchable work.

Sparklite is trying to walk in that tradition. It’s an action-adventure built openly on the SNES Zelda template, trying to bring that spirit into now. It looks incredible and plays with the kind of smoothness that feels inevitable—like one of those afternoons when you’d grab a cold Fanta from the fridge and immediately sit back down at the SNES. You’re fighting some villain called the Baron who’s corrupting the world, but that’s just story. What matters is that someone is still making this kind of game.

It’s coming this year on everything—PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch. I’m ready for it.