Sometimes games come along that instantly grab attention with their visual style. You don’t have to look far for examples – just one trailer The Last Night it was enough for a huge number of people to become interested in the project, knowing neither the plot nor the gameplay. Skellboy also applies to similar games, although, of course, much fewer people know about it. It’s hard to pass by this strange voxel world with flat characters and objects.
Lord of Bones
There is trouble in the kingdom of Cubold – through his butler, the king sends a message in which he reports on the atrocities of the court wizard Skuaruman (this is not the only reference to “The Lord of the Rings”). Due to the fact that he could not go on a date with the princess, he got angry and decided to summon monsters and the living dead. Our task is to save the kingdom from complete destruction, defeat all opponents and deal with Skuaruman before he causes trouble.
Pass for the sake of history Skellboy It’s definitely not worth it – it itself is not the most interesting, and the dialogues with the characters are literally painful to read. Banal phrases, unfunny jokes, lack of humor in moments when it would seem to be useful – the game has nothing to offer in terms of storytelling. You might think that this happened because of the heavy emphasis on gameplay, but many questions arise about it too.
Skellboy is an action role-playing game – you travel through locations, fight and collect equipment. In similar games, the inventory is filled with helmets and breastplates, and here everything is about the same, but there is one important difference – the main character is not looking for clothes and armor, but body parts. Being a skeleton, he can easily change one torso for another or put a new head in place of the old skull.
The idea is certainly fun, but that’s where its originality ends. I’m glad that new body parts are displayed on the character (usually developers try not to waste resources on this), but there is nothing unusual among the things. The weapon’s attack power increases or decreases, the torso can give two additional "lives", boots either change the speed of movement, or increase the hero’s stability when attacking (receiving damage, he flies back a little), or affect something else minor.
There are some really funny https://ridottocasino.co.uk/ moments like rooms where monsters fall from the ceiling, replacing the head you put on with themselves. You have to suffer with inverted controls and quickly look for a normal part of the body in order to “change clothes” and defeat these “headcrabs”. But such episodes are very, very few – often Skellboy tries to make you laugh with a princess wig, in which you become a charming girl for others, or a weapon in the form of a French baguette, crumbling with every blow.
Skin and bones
Otherwise, this action hardly stands out from others. The combat system, for example, is terribly primitive – although the character gets more and more types of weapons over time, you use the same. You can throw a spear, but there is no auto-aim, and doing it yourself with a fixed camera is problematic. A sword is also not the best option – playing with it is simply boring. But with a big mace it’s more interesting, especially when you hold the button to charge a blow, and the first time you fall apart a pack of opponents.
But there is no depth in the fights here, so they get boring almost instantly. In addition, there is no need to collect any currency here, and only new parts can drop from enemies. If you have already killed the same zombies 15 times and received their heads and legs, in the future they will no longer be able to offer anything new, so you can run past. But the fights with the bosses turned out to be quite good – they are moderately difficult, they force you to approach battles wisely, find the right moments to strike and control the environment, which is filled with all sorts of traps.
Everything else is hard to praise. The fixed camera sometimes turns out to be very inconvenient, especially if you need to jump from one platform to another. It’s not so difficult to get confused in the locations, but there are no signs – if you didn’t read the last dialogue carefully, get ready to refer to the walkthrough. And somehow it was already posted on the Internet before the game’s release, as if the developers themselves had written it.
Plus, due to the lack of a map, sometimes you miss save points. Once I lost about 15 minutes because, by coincidence, I turned in the right (“plot”) direction several times in a row. It feels like no one tested the game – only its creators themselves, who know perfectly well where and what they placed.
Bad, but not terrible
Another drawback has to do with the pacing of the story. In the second half of the game Skellboy changes and even approaches the rating of “Commendable”: you get access to a teleport that takes you to save points, as well as to all previously found body parts, indicating the missing parts. Exploring the world becomes a little more exciting, and there are also side quests that reward weapons, armor, and even useful skills, including the ability to create hats by bringing the hatmaker the necessary materials.
But the first half is melancholy and despondency. You walk through linear locations to music that begins to weigh on your brain with monotony, lazily fight boring enemies, collect junk and read banal dialogues – if not for the review, I would have given up the game very quickly. She simply has nothing to captivate her – only the visual style saves the day. Even the main distinctive feature (changing body parts) is not implemented in the best way due to the fact that the items do not have special skills that would make it worth changing the wardrobe. Why did the boss drop boots that ignite the ground under his feet, if I myself take damage from the fire?? It’s better to leave the speed-up shoes found at the very beginning, otherwise the hero is already terribly slow.
Also disappointing is the poor performance on the Switch, which makes your head hurt at some point. The frame rate drops for any reason – you can be walking along the corridor, when suddenly the game freezes for a second and you teleport a couple of meters forward. It’s especially “fun” to encounter such shortcomings during battles with opponents or a boss and lose health, which the character doesn’t have very much anyway. Fortunately, first aid kits are found quite often, and this does not cause too many problems.
Skellboy attracts with its appearance, but cannot boast of anything else. As an action game it is very weak, because you don’t like using weapons, and the tactics against many enemies are the same. As a role-playing game, it’s also not very successful – changing body parts is fun at first, but you soon realize that there’s nothing special about this system. A few hours after the start, the game becomes a little more exciting, but it will not be easy to survive until this moment.
Pros: original visual style; fun boss battles; the second half of the game is more interesting than the first.
Cons: dreary first half; the absence of at least some pointers and hints on the next step; primitive battles with ordinary enemies; the role-playing system seems non-standard, but in fact it is very simple and banal; annoying soundtrack; poor optimization on Switch.