Lila's Sky Ark Review

Lila’s Sky Ark is an atmospheric 2D metroidvania game, and I honestly think that the puzzle tag is missing from the Steam page because there is quite a bit of puzzle solving. In this game we are in the shoes of Lila, a girl that is trying to save her bizarre land — however, I couldn't tell you from what or why, even after playing for six hours, and I truly believe this is the game's biggest downfall.

In Lila's Sky Ark you don't have a weapon, as anything you can pick up is your weapon. You can smash enemies in the face with crates, bombs, and weird little spirits (to this day I'm still not sure what they are). I was very intimidated by this mechanic at first because I'm bad at quickly aiming and dodging, but after a while of practice it ended up being one of the highlights of the game. Running around collecting random things to then use on enemies became one of the more fun things to do whilst I ran around completely lost and confused. See? Biggest downfall. The lack of proper dialogue and structure in the story makes it difficult to know what the goal even is. This was specifically a problem in the early game when I barely understood how to even manoeuvre around the strange new gameplay, so I ran around like a headless chicken, collecting things without knowing I could use them to hit enemies too.

As I learned later on, there's a menu that shows you the items you've held and explains not only what they are but also what they're used for. Upon finding this feature and getting my first backpack, I began thinking that the mechanic was going to be very annoying as it kept making me open and close menus just to even know what the items did or what I had. I eventually got the hang of using the backpack quicker and it stopped getting in the way altogether. 

Another downside of the game is that it doesn’t let you save anywhere, so you have to go back to your home and save if you want to make sure you don't lose any progress. This was a bit difficult for me because I struggle to not get lost in games and this world felt particularly confusing. Not to mention that the map wasn't very helpful, if at all! 

However, not everything in the game is a downfall, as I found myself enjoying the gameplay more as time went on. The problem is that it took me quite a while to actually care for it, and by the time I started to find enjoyment I saw that the game mentioned I was already at 49% of the way through. Although I found enjoyment in things like bosses and collecting the items to throw, it wasn’t enough to take me through the rest of Lila’s Sky Ark. With a lack of an EXP system or any reason to fight enemies, I started dodging them instead because they'd just use up the items I had hoarded up for the bosses for no good reason, take my life, or just hold me back for a long time. Eventually, I just didn’t see much of a point to playing. The game — unfortunately — gets stale. 

And that leads me to my last point: NPCs are kind of useless. In Lila's Sky Ark, the NPCs speak weirdly and act strange, almost like they're not really people. The only one that's kind of normal is a guy with an umbrella that you meet early on in the game. He sometimes appears to give a warning about an upcoming area, but otherwise, no one really makes sense nor does anything. The worst offender was this particular NPC that told me he was going to rob me and that he had a weapon behind his back... but then nothing happened. He didn't attack me, he didn't rob me, nothing. He just stood there and when I spoke to him again, he repeated the dialogue as if we were speaking for the first time. 

Lila's Sky Ark is a fun game with pretty graphics and very interesting mechanics that I haven't seen in a game before. Unfortunately, aside from killing bosses and finding the next cool item to smash on enemies, there wasn't much urging me to keep playing. The NPCs were weird, the story was extremely vague, and the collectibles you can get in the game only serve to decorate an NPC which I think is Lila’s father.