Review: Order of Twilight

Order of Twilight

 Being a Mac/Linux user I often lament the lack of multiplatform My Little Pony fangames, and often I wondered why nopony was using the excellent LÖVE engine to do so. However during the last My Little Game Jam a certain game named Order of Twilight was submitted to the competition by a member of a certain Stabyourself.net. Sound familiar? It should. Stabyourself.net was the team behind the famous indie game Mari0 (which was pretty much Mario with portals) and the fact that one of their members decided to contribute to My Little Game Jam is rather encouraging.

 Just because Order of Twilight comes from a well-regarded source doesn't mean that it's automatically a perfect game. To read our short review of it continue on after the break.

 Order of Twilight is a platformer with a puzzle-centric focus. You play as Twilight Sparkle who appears to have been trapped within her own mind by Discord and must escape using various spells while avoiding spikes and Diamond Dogs. The spells are cast via the arrow keys, and as the player progresses they will be able to cast more powerful spells such as teleportation, invisibility, and wall-walking. All this may sound somewhat confusing, but don't worry. The game does a wonderful job of explaining everything as it goes along, and like all good puzzle games should it gradually becomes more difficult as Twilight comes closer to breaking free.

Things really get crazy later on.

 Graphically OoT (no, not that one) is rather minimalistic, with a unified 8-bit style. This is probably a good thing since more complex sprites would have been distracting from the core gameplay, but I do appreciate the parallax scrolling effect that Maurice added to the background. The soundtrack only contains two actual songs and is 14 seconds long in total (not counting the sound effects and static), but tends to fade into the background and thankfully doesn't get annoying after being looped over and over.

 Since Order of Twilight was created in 27 hours it is rather short with 12 stages in total. A "challenge mode" that encourages minimal spell use adds a little replay value to the game, but once you have completed it there is little reason to go back. After looking through the source code (which can be downloaded here) I have discovered that with the use of a graphical editor and a minimal amount of coding one should be able to create extra levels, but since I haven't tested this out yet I can neither confirm nor deny that idea. It is possible that Stabyourself.net might release a level editor for the game; after all they did make one for Mari0, but don't get your hopes up.


 What could be done to improve the game? The level editor that several users have mentioned would be the only thing so far, since there really isn't much that I can think of to improve the game (maybe some of our readers have suggestions?). It would also have been nice to have more opportunities to use certain spells such as the invisibility spell, which is only required once. Giving a game like this a definitive score is hard, but for now I'm going to give this a 7/10.

What did you think of the game, eh? Let us know in the comments!