Bertie: Oh I’ll just give it a quick go… An hour-and-a-half flies by. I am in love.
Skul: The Hero Slayer previewDeveloper: NeowizPublisher: Southpaw Games Platform: Played on PCAvailability: Only available on Steam for £15.49 (discounted to £12.39 until 3rd Feb)
Skul is a bit like Hades but viewed side-on. It’s an action-based Rogue-lite where you get one life to see how far you can get. You’re not escaping a mythical underworld, but you are on a team traditionally viewed as the baddies, the demons, and you’re fighting the heroes. Specifically, you’re a skeleton, but more on that later because it’s important. As you fight, you collect power-ups and abilities, and, at intervals, there’s a shop where you can spend currency to either heal or buy further power-ups and abilities. See what I mean? Quite Hades-like.
But! And here’s where we get back to the skeleton part: because you’re a skeleton, you can take your head off and put another one on, and when you do, you become whatever that head was. Was it a sorcerer-like head? Become a sorcerer. Was it a thief’s hooded head? Become a thief. Was it a warrior? And so on. And each of those heads represents a different set of abilities and moves.
You can have two of these heads equipped at any one time, and this is a very important thing, because you can swap between heads while you fight. In fact, you’re encouraged to do so, because switching triggers special abilities related to the heads you have equipped. It’s necessary if you want to do well, and you do, I can tell.
Chris: Given our general proximity to skeletons, it’s weird that we don’t like them more. There’s a brilliant Ray Bradbury story about the horror of realising that there’s a skeleton inside us, and then think of all those games where skeletons are bashed and smashed and knocked to pieces.