HomeNewsSkul: The Hero Slayer
A stab-brawler. A stabrawler.
Maybe youmiss Hollow Knight, or you’re dead tired ofDead Cells. ThenSkul: The Hero Slayermight appeal. It’s a side-on stabrawler roguelite that’s just left early access in which you can swap skulls to swap skills, and also lob your noggin at enemies. It’s nice, from my brief play of it, and there’s an announcement trailer below.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Skul is a game in which you technically play the baddies, hence the “Hero Slayer” title. But really the heroes are human jerks and the skeletons mostly just want to be left alone. Plus Skul, your character, is cute as a button. He’s cute in every one of his forms. You’ll switch out his head for a wolf skull that let’s you move quicker and cause damage while dashing, or a minotaur skull that let’s you damage crowds of enemies with a ground-pound (just as the minotaur did to Theseus), or a jester skull that let’s you chuck knives. There are a bunch more, dished out at random between areas.
The game has been in early access since last year, when Steve played it for our since departed Premature Evaluation column. He enjoyed it,while finding it too reliant on RNG at the time.
All of which is to say that in this unbalanced early access version, Skul doesn’t flow nearly as well as it could. Drawing a weak skull early on for example, or simply a skull you don’t enjoy using, effectively scuppers any given run from the outset – it feels like roguelike poison to be dealt a bad hand immediately after respawning. And the rewards you’re unlocking as you accrue your purple points are so incremental as to be barely noticeable, adding tiddly percentage points to your attack power or millisecond decreases of cooldowns at a time.
Skul: The Hero Slayeris availablefrom Steamfor £15.50/$16/€13.43.
