The difficulty of the game can vary wildly depending simply on whether the random number generator is in your favour: if you get a powerful Rare or Legendary skull early on it can carry you through to the late game without much issue, but if you have the misfortune to get stuck with endless Spear or Sword skulls with a suboptimal ability you’re going to have a much more difficult time. It’s that luck component that is, in some ways, Skul’s weakness, though. The abilities and bonuses you receive from your gear are also semi-randomised: while, for example, the Werewolf skull will always increase your move speed, it will pick an active ability at random from a pool of 3 or 4, so there’s always an element of chance at play. Levels are stitched together from a list of possible maps and screens, ensuring that you’ll never have quite the same journey twice, although there are certain constants along the way: you’ll always find a shop screen, for example, or fight an adventurer or one of the screen-filling bosses at roughly the same spot on each run. The game leans heavily into the idea of its procedurally-generated content. There are a lot of factors at play to make each run unique The abilities granted to you by your skulls and your quintessence also have cooldowns of varying lengths rather than something like an MP cost, encouraging you to use them while generally stopping them from becoming so overpowered and overused that the gameplay gets boring. Also squirrelled away in your inventory are up to nine artifacts that grant a variety of passive bonuses, and a type of item called a ‘quintessence’ which provides an extra ability with which to wreak havoc. You can have two skulls in your possession at once and can swap between them at will, with a short cooldown. Personal favourites included the Rock Star, where Skul attacks by rocking out on his guitar, the Rider, which is a motorbike-riding, chain-wielding, flaming-headed nightmare who is definitely legally distinct from Marvel’s Ghost Rider, and the Grim Reaper, which is pretty much what it says on the can. As you journey out into enemy-filled lands you’ll come across a handful of friendly NPCs who will migrate back to the Demon King’s castle to help you out on your runs, like the Witch, a buxom sorceress with an affinity for cats who allows you to permanently increase stats like your physical and magical damage or your health, and the Fox Hunter, a grouchy vulpine head-vendor who gives you a free skull to start off your run with a little extra firepower.īy default, you have a melee attack, a dash, and a double jump, but the truly original – and fun – mechanic at play here is the ability to swap out Skul’s, well, skull, changing your look and granting new and fun abilities in the process. Skul is a roguelike, so expect to play through the same levels a lot, making incremental progress before dying and being sent back to the start, gradually unlocking helpful tools and upgrades back at your home base to make your subsequent journeys a little easier. Incidentally, I’ve chosen Caerleon for this review as it appears to be on most of the marketing material, but throughout the game it’s almost always (but not always) written as Carleon, so who knows? It’s a small point, but it did occasionally serve to take me out of the zone while playing. Obviously a large amount of your time will be taken up with the action of the game rather than reading so it’s not a deal-breaker by any means, but even now I’m not entirely sure, for example, whether the evil human empire is supposed to be Caerleon or Carleon. That said, the writing isn’t afraid to be gently funny in places too, and there’s a quiet thread of silliness running through even with all the carnage.Ī small quibble with the writing lies simply in the number of typos strewn throughout. The First Hero and his sidekicks run the gamut from lofty zealots to self-obsessed dunces to frighteningly cruel degenerates, and you really feel a sense throughout that if you don’t fight these guys off, it’s going to be curtains for you and your pals. While you do play from the ‘evil’ point of view, rather than being a joyfully sadistic approach to being the bad guy in the vein of Destroy All Humans or Dungeon Keeper, it does a good job of presenting the ‘good guys’ as pretty menacing on their own merits. S kul provides a fun narrative backdrop for its roguelike gameplay, and it’s nice to see an innovative reversal of the traditional good-vs-evil story.
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