#5 - March 2025 - Spartoi Meadow
Spartoi Meadow is a charming little action RPG with the look of an early PS2 title, or maybe a Dreamcast title. It's a short game that you can easily knock out in a couple of hours. The English translation is a little goofy and enjoys RANDOM capitalization of WORDS even if the emphasis MAKES NO SENSE. And while I'll honestly admit that if you watch gameplay footage that it does look a little rough around the edges--the game is perfectly responsive, but the combat does feel rather weightless--it's got an earnest feel that's just way too charming.
Spartoi Meadow came out on Steam in 2020. It is not exactly what I would call a popular game--as of right now, 2025, it has 14 reviews total. Despite that, it's been consistently updated all the way through this year. For examples of what has been added since:
- In 2020, in the months after launch, local co-op was added. Extra graphics settings were added. Various mechanical tweaks were made, like including a stun gauge for bosses and an NPC who enables New Game+ near the end of the game.
- In 2021, the graphics were updated twice! And a new boss fight was added.
- In 2022, "double edge" attacks were added which are just like desperation attacks in beat em ups, meaning you can sacrifice your health for an extra strong attack. NPC party members were also added.
- In 2023... the graphics were updated again!
- In 2024, you may not believe this, but the graphics were updated again. If you're curious, here's pictures of the old version and the new version.
- Finally, in 2025, literally 3 days before I started writing this, some more changes were made like adding new mystery merchants with unique weapons for sale, and curiously enough, changing the game to have a white border permanently around it. Like a Polaroid photo.
Incidentally, my replay was on the 2024 version since Morning Glows kindly put most of the older versions up as beta branches you can opt into--the Polaroid style appearance is certainly interesting, but I'm not sure it comes across too well in screenshots and it causes some UI elements to look a bit odd. The below picture is right from the Steam page.
Regardless of my opinions on that most recent update, it's a pretty impressive list of updates given the game's niche status. Morning Glows is also working on their second Steam release called Nivoz Running Canned, which is a third-person shooter where you play as some kind of robot girl named Juju who, through the whims of fate, ends up partnered with a small robot that "looks like canned food"--named Nivoz. It has a demo up, too!
What drew me to Spartoi Meadow was the kind of weird aesthetic of the game. At times the environments have an almost ethereal look to them that I can't say I've seen too often. I'm not versed enough in graphics to describe it, but it's almost like some aggressive bloom/filtering was added to everything. The cutscenes, infrequent as they are, have a sort of interesting framing where the Japanese text is still displayed off to the side even with the English translation turned on. In reality, this occurs even if the game's language is set to Japanese--the only thing that toggle actually does is change non-cutscene dialogue.
Spartoi Meadow follows the misadventures of Mischa, a completely ordinary villager from the town of Led. The introduction features her and her brother, Benjamin, being attacked by a mysterious entity known as the Meadowman. Things go badly and they both get knocked into a river, with Mischa later being rescued by a mysterious girl known as Silvia. The two quickly partner up, although Mischa mainly just wants to go home and Silvia is just... well, she's just vibing. She's a traveler, that's all.
What happened to Benjamin? ... Don't worry about it. (You can find him later in the game and he'll rejoin you as an optional guest)
At this point you actually get control over the girls on their journey back to Led, made slightly more complicated by the fact that the roads are now littered with Meadowmen (or Meadowmans, as the game often calls them) everywhere, leading to the game's introduction to combat.
Spartoi Meadow's combat is kind of cool because you can feel a very slight amount of weird jank to it but it was pretty clearly tightly designed to handle exactly like how Morning Glows intended. The camera is fixed, and with fights taking place in exactly whatever piece of terrain the fight started in, this can lead to some awkward camera angles. Your characters auto-guard at all times if you're not attacking or dashing, so moving cautiously prevents any cheap hits that you couldn't see due to off-screen enemies. Fights usually only have 2 or 3 enemies, too, so you don't have to worry about getting mobbed.
One nifty detail is that both Silvia and Mischa actually have a fair number of animations in their quick and heavy attacks that share the same actual frame data, range, etc but just look different. This is a deliberate decision to add some visual spice since this isn't exactly a fancy character action game where you're breaking out big, elaborate combos and chaining together tons of unique moves.
Enemies frequently drop equipment that scales to your party level. The weapons they drop have their own skills that can replace your default generic heavy attacks. Early on it may just be a handaxe that has the "KICK" move which, true to its name, lets you perform a quick couple of lunging kicks that hit twice, but later weapons have up to 3 skills at a time that can be performed with some variation of just C, CZ, or CC--as described in-game, "C" is your heavy attack button, and "Z" is the light attack button. You can quickly chain from quick attacks into your heavies and thus into the skills your weapon has, too, but attacking does cost AP, which thankfully comes back quickly if you're not attacking.
Slightly more curiously, equipped armor--usually just amulets, bangles, gloves and the sort--also randomly alter the girls' appearance, such as changing the style of armor they're wearing or even altering their hairstyle. This just seems to be a bit of fun visual flair. At one point it was sort of bugged and didn't work too well outside of armor later in the game, but Morning Glows updated it so that it's able to happen much sooner. Blacksmiths also let you mess with Silvia and Mischa's appearance and color schemes too, if you'd like.
Spartoi Meadow is short.
My first playthrough was just under four hours. That's with time spent grabbing screenshots to show off and discussing the game in Discord with it still running in the background.
This time it took me a bit longer, closer to 5-6 hours in total, since I was grabbing video footage and grabbing extra screenshots and jotting down some notes on the side.
As someone who routinely gets sucked into extremely long games--please don't ask me how long I spent playing a single character in Elin as soon as it came out in Early Access--that's a pleasant change of pace. Mischa and Silvia's journey is not a particularly deep one, it doesn't outstay its welcome, and you can easily knock it out in an afternoon if you felt like it. Most of the plot is quite simply just the two girls trying to successfully navigate a path through the Meadowman-infested countryside so Mischa can go back home.
Sure, you get wrapped up in finding out that Silvia only ended up coming here after the curse of the Spartoi (a name that's never explained, but just going by appearances and how the Spartoi resemble more armored, monstrous Meadowmen, if you assume the Meadowmen are the grunts, the Spartoi seem to be the big shots) destroyed her country and caused her to flee alongside a mage by the name of Dorothy. And sure, it turns out that Silvia has some sort of fairly unique talent to not just kill the Meadowmen and Spartoi but to completely destroy them, to render their curse meaningless, but Spartoi Meadow... isn't really about that. These are just footnotes in the adventure that is Mischa's No Good Very Bad Day. She just happened to meet an odd but strong girl who helped her get back to her hometown, and that odd but strong girl so happens to come from a now destroyed land that we never even learn the name of.
Silvia never mentions any of this to Mischa. It's told to the player, and the player alone, via a flashback. Some dialogue seems to suggest Silvia may have suffered some short-term memory problems after her jump through the gate from her land to Mischa's, since she initially doesn't even recognize Dorothy despite having gone through the gate with her.
You do learn some lore about the Meadowman, of course. Apparently, they're a yearly phenomenon that started two years ago. At that time, they were no more than weird scarecrows that were so frail that even bad weather would destroy them, although their demise would spread poison and pestilence in the process. A year after that, they began to appear in hordes to the point that bounties were placed on them, which successfully fixed the problem once more. This time, two years after their initial appearance in Mischa's homeland, they can walk, they can fight back, and it's no longer a problem that ordinary people can manage. South Domi, a town that nearly shares a border with Mischa's hometown of Led, is now completely overrun, and things are spiraling out of control.
But again, Spartoi Meadow isn't really about that. It's framing for the state of the world which is honestly a lot more grim sounding in concept than in practice, as most of your game time is spent navigating some fairly basic countryside roads, forests, and mountain paths trying to secure a route back to Led, encountering a few dead-ends on the way, beating up the big Meadowmen/Spartois when they show up, and just having what feels like a small stakes adventure despite everything. That's not a complaint, really. I find it pretty charming!
The actual design of Spartoi Meadow is cut fairly lean. You move fast on the overworld, fast enough to generally avoid getting into fights unless the terrain's too narrow to dodge enemies. Spartoi Meadow uses the symbol encounter style of fights, so you can just run past enemies outside of bosses or a couple of specific forced fights. You can also attack outside of fights, and if you hit an enemy before it touches you on the field, you instantly win although you get only 1 EXP. You can teleport between save points, which makes backtracking very fast the few times it's needed. And the maps themselves aren't that big in general, too.
There's no healing items, and in fact there's no consumables of any kind. There IS money, but all you can do with it up until recently is buy randomly generated equipment at one of the few blacksmiths in the game. A patch in 2025 did add some new merchants with unique gear. It's very possible you'll never interact with gold other than when you sell stuff to make room in your inventory.
Combat against normal enemies tends to be straightforward. Regardless of choosing to play Silvia or Mischa, the other girl will assist you as an AI partner that fully heals every fight and is more than capable of grabbing attention from enemies so you can safely attack them. They do have reduced HP--your character has 100, the AI one has 60--but it's not too big a deal.
Boss fights are... somewhat of a different story. Bosses all tend to have a more aggressive range of attacks, have ample HP, and all hit fairly hard. Moreover, a mechanic that got added post-release can completely change the way you approach them: the stun gauge.
Every major boss--even the last one!--can be stunned. But to stun them, you have to build up their stun gauge by hitting them a lot without being hit yourself. This includes auto-guarding attacks. Even if you take 0 damage, the stun gauge buildup gets reduced by a lot. You'll have to patiently weave in small attacks during openings, figure out what angles bosses are vulnerable from as quite a few have attacks that cover a big range and you frankly don't move that fast. Your AI partner helps a lot in this regard, since if the boss is focusing on them, this can give you an opening to get in some hits. Your AI partner can't contribute to the stun gauge, and it also doesn't count against you if they get hit.
Stunning a boss chops off 60% of its HP instantly, and once the stun ends, they drop a unique weapon. The unique weapons always have a full set of skills on them and unique models. The pause menu even shows you which ones you've collected! But if you miss them... that's it, sort of. A couple bosses do have refights later in the game that can be stunned and drop their weapon if you missed it, and there is a NG+ that carries over your boss weapons.
Incidentally, I'd like to place some emphasis on the weapon dropping "once the stun ends". Don't ask how I discovered that one. I'm not mad, I'm not mad, I'm not mad... (if you kill the boss during the stun period, it just doesn't drop at all)
When I first played in 2023, I only got 4 of the boss weapons. The pause menu shows 7 silhouettes for them. In the final area, a mysterious NPC mentions "Five of seven..." alluding to the fact that you get something for collecting 5. Crestfallen, I let it go since it was too late to do anything about it--there's only one save file, and it was the end of the game. I didn't know about the New Game+ NPC at this point, either.
When I replayed it now in 2025, I made up for my past failures and collected 6 out of 7. The last weapon is from the last boss, and stunning it is... er... I'm not good enough to get that one. Anyway, your reward for collecting 5 of 7 boss weapons is a very funny weapon called the Talos. It's stuck at level 1, so its normal attacks are terrible, but it comes with a skill called Fi-Nail which costs 55(!!) of your 100 HP to use, and calls forth a rain of swords that's so strong it even lops off half of the final boss's HP in one use.
Is that a good reward? ... Sort of? You can't use Fi-Nail twice or you'll die. If the target is left standing after Fi-Nail, your normal swings with the Talos are exceedingly weak, so you're left relying on your AI companions to close out the fight. But by the end, not only do you have either Mischa or Silvia with you for the last boss, but also Benjamin (Mischa's brother, an armored warrior) or Dorothy (Silvia's partner from her home country) can join. Dorothy's a pretty strong mage who tends to never attract enemy aggro, so to easily beat the last boss you can just use Fi-Nail once and then sit there auto-guarding while Dorothy finishes it off for you.
Is it honorable? No. Does it work? Yes. Did I abuse this? God, did I ever.
In the end, after somehow getting dragged along into slaying the Hydra, a mysterious giant entity that may have been responsible for the destruction of Silvia's homeland and the continued spreading of the Meadowmen and Spartois in Mischa's country, Mischa finally gets to go home to Led. The Spartois vanish, although the Meadowmen still show up from time to time. Dorothy and Silvia move in with Mischa and work as bounty hunters to keep eliminating any more Meadowmen that show up.
I'm very glad for their polycule, by the way.
As for me? I'm satisfied enough. Morning Glows set out to make an action RPG that wasn't overly fussed with intricate button combinations, having to work hard to memorize boss patterns to an agonizing degree, or constant snap reflexes. Random attack animations were added simply to add flair to combat so that every press of the X button didn't result in the same exact swing. The camera is forced to a fixed position in fights, unable to be moved, simply because Morning Glows liked the aesthetic composition of what it did to fights, and in turn also added the auto-guard mechanic to ensure that enemies that were hard to see due to the camera couldn't get cheap shots on you. There's a clear vision there that manages to work wrapped up in short but fun package that I'll still think about every so often.
... It still is kind of odd looking and the action RPG combat is kinda weightless, though. But I think at the end of the day, Spartoi Meadow's short enough to come off as interesting--I'd probably be much more negative if it were a really long game, admittedly.
Moreover, while I hope Morning Glows continues development of their new game, I'll certainly be watching in 2026 for when I see that mysterious 'Update Queued' pop up by Spartoi Meadow in my library once again.
As a brief epilogue of sorts, I decided to record all of the boss fights in the game and toss them up in an unlisted YouTube playlist. Don't feel compelled to watch, obviously, but if you're interested in what the game looks like in motion and seeing some more of the occasionally goofy dialogue then feel free to look at the YouTube playlist here.
They generally include any pre-fight or post-fight cutscenes, including the ending. I haven't recorded anything like this before, generally speaking, so hopefully it came out well. The playlist is sorted by the order in which those fights happen in-game.
I also, uh, learned at the last minute that I apparently forgot to grab footage of one of the bosses, but it was just a Treant re-fight with nothing new about it so that's fine. Oops!!
