While such a narrative vacuum is not out of place in roguelikes, Southpaw very clearly tried to implement a well-realized political conflict into their fantasy universe, but it comes up too infrequently. I haven’t mentioned Skul‘s story, and that’s because I honestly don’t even know what it’s about. The slow ramp-up from feeble skeleton child to maelstrom of destruction is a sight to behold, and it’s aided by the considerable amount of environmental destruction unfolding during the game’s most chaotic moments. Enemies are getting poisoned and burned, lightning is striking every few seconds, and little familiars are buzzing around my character’s head, firing lasers and magical spells at anything that moves. Players can equip up to nine items at once, and since they all house multiple elemental properties, Skul will have transformed into a veritable whirlwind of death by the end of a run. The effects also stack, so equipping more items with the volcano attribute will lower the recharge time to 30, 20 and then a mere five seconds. An item with one point in “volcano,” for example, will cause fireballs to burst out of my character every 35 seconds. But they also carry elemental properties that give Skul passive bonuses. Most of them offer stock-standard buffs like an attack boost or an increase to the amount of money earned. Equipment, in particular, is an interesting wrinkle. Navigation through each run is much like it is in Hades as the door to each chamber hints at the type of reward it’ll offer – either gold, a new skull, or a piece of equipment – so when players are presented with multiple options, they can prioritize the goodies they’re looking for. Sometimes the random number generation goes our way, but even when it doesn’t, it can lead to brilliant moments of discovery. Each form has its own attributes and special attacks, and the fact that we can only hold two skulls at any given time presents difficult choices. The variety is through the roof, and while players will obviously develop favorites – I was partial to the rapid slash attacks of the werewolf skull myself – the joy is in being forced to adapt to the characters we’re less comfortable with when the drops aren’t favorable. The demon Yaksha is in there somewhere, as is the protagonist from Dead Cells. Pop culture staples get obvious stand-ins, like a flaming biker who attacks by swinging chains and, yeah, is definitely Ghost Rider. Gunslingers and magic casters are thrown into the mix. These skulls start out as simple weapon swaps, with Skul trading his default bone club for something like a spear or a knife, but soon the transformations become more fanciful. The result is a roguelike with dozens of playable characters. The hero, a skeleton, can swap his head out for any others that he finds along a run, and each one transforms him into an entirely new creature. There’s a jump button, an attack button and a dodge, and that’s about all there is to Skul’s basic combat, but those simple foundations are what allow Skul’s signature gimmick to flourish. It’s a side-scrolling action-platformer in which players must clear a room of all enemies, collect the reward, move on to the next chamber and repeat. On its face, despite a great soundtrack and some extraordinary pixel art, there’s little remarkable about Skul. Since they were developed concurrently, however, the simple truth is that Southpaw Games has a comparable understanding of how to keep roguelikes fresh and exciting over hours and hours of inherent repetition. The structural similarities are so visible that had this been released a couple of years later, I’d cite Hades as a naked influence. In the case of Skul: The Hero Slayer, however, the comparison is a compliment. The roguelike genre is going to be living in the shadow of Hades for some time, and I’m already resisting the urge to hold every developer to the almost unreasonable standard that Supermassive set last year. LOW The “normal” difficulty is ludicrously harsh.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |