In fact, pretty much everything in Darkened Skye is funny; the game's loopy sense of humor is its biggest selling point. The game loves playing with the fact that it's a game, for example, when Skye sees something written on a cave wall and cries out, "Oh, no, we'll never figure out what it says -- it's written in backwards writing."
For all its easy charm, Darkened Skye is flawed, with somewhat awkward controls that caused me to fall in the water and drown far more often than necessary. At other times the game play is quite fun, as in an Air Pirate sky camp where one floats high above the ground on magical pillows. Unfortunately, the game increases in difficulty purely by throwing more and more monsters at you, making things ever harder and less enjoyable.
Like Eternal Darkness, Darkened Skye calls on you to use magic, in this case fueled by -- you guessed it -- Skittles. My favorite battle spell drives your enemy mad, at which point he will wander around in confusion while you hack him to death.
The Skittles angle doesn't seem intrusive; it's just a part of the game. If you didn't know that Skittles was a candy, you wouldn't realize that the worlds that Skye visits are based on Skittles commercials.
Unfortunately, Darkened Skye is a buggy game. Halfway through, the funny cinematic sequences that further the story vanished; I would solve a puzzle and instead of an amusing encounter I would just jump to the next level. This is a very bad bug in a game whose strength lies primarily in its witty dialogue. Not everyone will encounter this bug, since PC games do not run consistently on all machines, and I have higher hopes for the GameCube version.
I had the opposite problem with Eternal Darkness; I had to watch its cinematic scenes over and over again. This completely ruined the game's final battle for me.
I died, watched the very long scene, died again, watched the scene again, died again, and finally gave up and went to www.gamefaqs.com to learn exactly what to do to win, because the amount of experimentation it would take to figure it out on my own could well have forced me to watch that scene another 30 or 40 times. It's a very clever battle, but all I could think about was how I wanted to hunt down the game's designers, grab them by the throat and scream, "What were you thinking?"
Alas, no matter how many brilliant ideas a game might have, it's the stupid things that will force people to drop their game controller and go out to see a generic action picture like "The Bourne Identity." And that's just sad.
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