Skully PC Preview

Terry is in a bit of a bind. Once a powerful god controlling a chunk of an island, he lost most of it, alongside his powers, when his brethren began warring against each other, upsetting the island’s balance in the process. To wrestle back control, he does what any responsible almost-former god would do – he reanimates a skull that’s exceptionally good at rolling around. In Skully, you are that skull and we got a taste of what playing as a reanimated cranium feels like earlier in June when we spent an hour with the third-person action-adventure platformer’s introductory levels.

In his default form, Skully is agile and able to roll relatively quickly in any direction, jump, and latch onto grassy portions of walls. The game’s levels are also full of collectible flowers, making Skully’s ability to gain momentum and jump on top of small pillars key to gathering those found in higher places or locations that are trickier to navigate. The sheer number of flowers and the unlockable artwork you receive upon grabbing a set number of them give strong collect-a-thon vibes. In this form, you can also speed past enemies, although there are other ways of dealing with them.

Spread across Skully’s linear levels you’ll find pools that initially start off as simple checkpoints that save your progress and replenish health. However, not long into the game, they also give access to Skully’s Clay Form, opening new avenues in terms of gameplay. The one form we got to play as allowed the protagonist to inhabit the body of a bulky golem. While this made him considerably slower and less agile, it also increased his strength. This meant that he could break through rock walls in the environment and smash the ground for an area of effect attack that hit any enemies in front of Skully. The one enemy type I faced were these water bubbles that dealt damage in an area close to them whenever they burst.  As they were fairly slow, didn’t pose a challenge, and I could use just one attack to dispatch them, fights struggled to keep me invested.

Skully can also hop in and out of his Clay Form and have multiple of them active at once, although I, sadly, didn’t get the chance to play a lot with these mechanics in the preview build. Its levels also had a small amount of challenge, mostly coming from navigating sloped platforms in default form, which required getting a better feel of how momentum works to properly get around. These sections also led to a few frustrating deaths caused by jumps that required a little more precision than the controls allowed or hitting a non-sticky pixel I couldn’t see when navigating grassy walls, both leading to short, fatal swims.

My brief time with Skully revealed an adequate action-adventure platformer that doesn’t reach particularly far and looks aimed at fans of the genre who simply want more. The first two levels, retread familiar paths and left me wishing I could do more interesting things with the protagonist, lovable in both his skull and Clay forms. While I did find myself going off the beaten path to grab as many flowers as I could, on the whole, the game’s opening moments didn’t inspire a ton of confidence. Nonetheless, the full version is greater in scope, featuring multiple clay forms and different types of interactions that will, hopefully, help make things more interesting when Skully launches on August 4th.

Bogdan Robert,
Senior Editor, NoobFeed
Twitter