BENGALURU: Now that Hades is an award-winning game, the underworld overrun by Olympians has been established as a rogue-like dungeon crawler. Hades features the rebellious Zagreus who runs acrossdungeon rooms, blastingenemies. Before the underworld, there was life.Betwixt these two, lies an almost invisible twodimensional virtual realm. The form it takes is a combination of a roguelike and a platformer. It goes by the name of Skul: The Hero Slayer.
While Skul is in reality not a prequel to Hades, it possesses several features that may credit it as a worthy precursor to the more popular dungeon-crawler. Skul released last week for the PC, after coming out of Early Access. You play as a skeleton. Not the lazy bones kind of skeleton, but one that was bone to be wild. Skul sets out on a risky adventure to dash and slash through evil humans that haunt his realm and rescue his king from captivity.
Like Hades, Skul employs permadeath — which means that you start from the start every time your HP reduces to zero. Your shame lands you on the platform with a Witch, who sells you increasingly expensive upgrades to your ‘skull, bone and spirit’. You gain these creatively named upgrades (there’s one called fracture prevention which has helped me the most so far) by earning the treasured Dark Quartz, which may be obtained by destroying skilled enemies.
As is with the protagonists of action-adventure games, Skul employs a fair bit of skullduggery to make combat consistently exciting. To begin with, Skul’s dash and slash action will keep you entertained. The enemies cowering with sad quips will make you chuckle, the way you do at a meme. But quite suddenly, the action escalates. Skul can throw his skull at enemies in a powerful action. He also possesses a special ‘quintessence’ power. The otherwise modest seeming skeleton suddenly acquires stunning new abilities. Like energy blasts, increased melee attack impacts and crit damage.
While the fun visuals trick you into playing reckless, without a strategy — the permadeath ultimately hurts us. Unlike Hades, which provides us worthy upgrades to rush through rooms, Skul is more punishing. I consider that quite un-‘humerus’ of them. Skul is fun, buy it while the inaugural sale is still on. Bone-Voyage.
Anusha Ganapathi
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)