A side-scrolling roguelike with a pixel artwork model and an lovely little cranium particular person protagonist, Skul: The Hero Slayer may simply be mistaken for about seven thousand different early entry games. After all, we’ve lengthy since hit peak pixel, reaching the stage in society the place pretty chunky squares are the mainstream quite than the exception, and aliased edges and bezier curves need to cower and beg on the street for hovering roast hen sprites.
Does that make any sense? I’ve bought a contact of fever this night and I’m penning this introductory paragraph in a state of delirious hypochondria, so my normally astute and leading edge observations have reverted again to PC gaming circa 2007.
Earlier nonetheless, again once I wasn’t careening ass-first down a greased-up slippy-slide to my nearly sure demise on the gaping maw of a worldwide pandemic, I used to be very a lot having fun with taking part in somewhat game referred to as Skul. It’s an early entry rogue-like, in as a lot as you respawn again at an enormous demon temple everytime you die, holding a pocketful of purple foreign money you might use to enhance a few of your attributes earlier than attempting once more. Unique to your hero is their capacity to take away and throw their precise head at enemies, earlier than both working after it to gather it or teleporting to wherever it landed.
While teleporting after your individual cranium feels like the premise of a puzzle platformer, that’s not what Skul is. You by no means need to drop your individual head down a laundry chute to succeed in a locked basement, or ship your cranium up in a dumbwaiter to materialise unexpectedly on a mafia boss’s dinner desk. Instead, Skul is a room-clearing fight game set in a fantasy world, the place you defeat enemies in randomised arenas to unlock doorways and proceed by means of chapters. You can throw your cranium prefer it’s a bony hand grenade, in addition to slash along with your sword and dodge to slide previous attacking enemies. The preventing feels snappy and healthful, with the well-drawn enemies graciously telegraphing their assaults with useful winding-up animations, in order that on the high of your game you possibly can moderately chart a course by means of the rooms with out ever taking a success.
But wait, all of that’s not even the purpose of the game. This is: there are dozens of different skulls you’ll be able to exchange your individual with, each granting you new powers and talents. Swap out your common cranium for the mother cranium and, in trade for lowered motion velocity, you get a gun and change into impervious to wreck from traps – the universally agreed upon traits of a mummy. Slip into the wolf cranium and you may transfer round extra shortly, trigger harm whenever you sprint and carry out a strong short-range claw assault. The minotaur cranium grants you an space of impact ground-pounding ability, helpful for bunched up enemies. The jester can chuck knives which explode, a gargoyle cranium helps you to fly.
The selection in skulls is bonkers big, with probably the most highly effective ones showing much less usually than your run of the mill, bread and butter bones. New skulls crop up in graveyards that seem each 4 or 5 rooms or, when you’ve progressed a short time into the primary space to rescue a useful fox character, could be picked up instantly after respawning. Depending on which one you begin with or discover, your run will form up otherwise, both urgent you to rise up near enemies to poke them to demise, get all aerial on them, or hold again for ranged assaults.
Here, it feels the slim selection in enemies on this model of the game doesn’t match as much as the seize bag assortment of skulls you’ll be sporting. As the final demon soldier left behind, you’re preventing a human military comprised primarily of warrior fodder, with a couple of crossbow snipers and double-sized brutes to combine issues up. Nature can also be turned towards you. Trees have come to life, corrupted by the purple stuff you’re utilizing to boost your talents, and granted the magical capacity to ship sharp roots up by means of the bottom from a distance, or emit scorching pink guffs of poison gasoline round them.
Too usually although, the form of the extent locations enemies on awkward to succeed in ledges, or spawns enemies designed to be saved at arm’s size subsequent to those that should be fought up shut. Certain environmental traps, like thorny vines, exist to maintain you from standing in a single spot for too lengthy, however others, just like the vegetation that intermittently spit projectiles, really feel like they’re from one other game fully. Some rooms have enemy-buffing shrines, which could be destroyed to take away the benefit they infer, however the shrines themselves take such a beating that it’s normally simpler to persist in going after the buffed enemies straight.
All of which is to say that on this unbalanced early entry model, Skul doesn’t circulation almost in addition to it may. Drawing a weak cranium early on for instance, or just a cranium you don’t take pleasure in utilizing, successfully scuppers any given run from the outset – it appears like roguelike poison to be dealt a nasty hand instantly after respawning. And the rewards you’re unlocking as you accrue your purple factors are so incremental as to be barely noticeable, including tiddly proportion factors to your assault energy or millisecond decreases of cooldowns at a time.
There’s at all times a balancing act between pushing the human participant to enhance their literal pad-in-hands abilities, and making issues steadily simpler by lavishing the character with enhancements to their in-game attributes, however Skul hasn’t but discovered the place that stability is. As someone chronically incapable of bettering themselves, I naturally choose the latter.
None of those are basic issues, and that is all tweakable stuff that ought to hopefully enhance in future releases. Skul’s burgeoning number of swappable heads locations the chilly hand of randomness on the coronary heart of this pleasant and vibrant roguelike, simply as my overheating mind positioned a sequence of blended physique half metaphors on the coronary heart of this awkward sentence. To what extent the developer can corral these wayward cube rolls into one thing extra reliably enjoyable stays to be seen.
