Review for The salty dog. Game for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 04/08/2020
Do you remember the "Shut up and swim" of Dory of "Finding Nemo“? Here, if we could best summarize the feel of Skully, the Finish Line Games platformer and published by Modus Games on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch, it would be something very similar: "Shut up and roll".
Git Gud
From the trailer it is clear that Skully is first of all a Platformer and it is logical to start from this element. The title of Finish Line Games begins with a very short cutscene that, with a few images, sees a beached skull come to life, or, more than anything else, shape, and creates the pretext to give the player a good amount of freedom: freedom to understand the game mechanics, freedom to understand how the little skull, Skully in fact, moves and reacts to inputs.
Already in these early stages you begin to notice one of the main defects of the game, something that lets itself go a little but that, level after level, gets exacerbated so much as to interrupt the enjoyment of the more advanced sections.
In fact, Skully moves by "moment of strength", a choice that ideally could be interesting and coherent from the point of view of character design but which is short-sighted, especially in the context of a multi-platform game that, clearly, does not take into consideration all platforms on which it is available. Skully is incredibly "heavy" to move and alternates between inert and hyper-sensitive, a defect that, again, would be annoying but of limited action with a more generous checkpoint system; here, on the other hand, any error in considering spaces will cost you dearly, since Skully will fall into the void, or into the lava, or into the water, and you will have to start over several minutes before.
Prepare to die… a lot
If the first few levels are linear and keep the player's demands relatively low, you will soon find yourself having to manage the inert Skully in the midst of chasing lava rivers, moving platforms and rather aggressive enemies. Here the title completely shows the side, bloody sum and decantation of all the frustration of every wrong jump up to that moment or of every curve taken too bravely: you will die, often, and sometimes too frustratingly.
A really bad checkpoint management, already mentioned above, is yet another spanner in the wheels of experience: redoing entire sections for a wrong jump only returns dissatisfaction and anger, even in the face of incredibly fast loading.
Depth
Another of the aspects that most undermine the general enjoyment of Skully is the management of the assets, more specifically their loading and rendering distance also and above all on a "limited" platform like Switch.
As tested and reviewed on the Nintendo console, we were able to compare different sections of gameplay on multiple platforms: if in part on the Switch the very blurred backdrops and the relative difficulty of the camera to "keep up" to the player can (but should not) be justified , similar defects become less acceptable when they are found on far more performing platforms, such as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
These are all too clear confirmation of the broad but limiting claims of the title, perhaps a new sign of poor overview: the choice of a single target platform could on the one hand facilitate the work at a production level, on the other hand it allowed some graphic improvements. to a title that is already too “thin” as an identity and representation on the screen.
One, none ... and three
The world of Skully is certainly colorful and diversified, with biomes that, although restricted on an exploratory level, offer a good visual and chromatic variety: oceans, clouds, volcanoes and fiery forests are all part of a world that can be silenced by excessive linearity in the boundaries but which is certainly an inspired world design, although not very well made. As per tradition in a platformer, the environment itself is the enigma to be solved, the obstacle to overcome, and what can a small skull do in the face of the aggressive nature of the world in which it finds itself rolling?
Little, maybe nothing. Precisely for this reason, the transformations to which Skully can undergo come to his aid, one of three, all interesting but, like much else of this title, superficial: if a large Golem-Skully can take down enemies and create platforms, a Skully -Cervo allows us to jump more effectively, while a third form gives us truly memorable long leaps. The environmental puzzles unfortunately do not hold up and we will rarely find ourselves with more than one way to get through the section, which makes it all a bit tasteless and too railroaded.
Skully is a title that since the trailer seems to promise light-heartedness and fun, but which in the realization shows several shortcomings: the movement of our alter-ego is approximate and too sensitive to changes of direction, especially on Nintendo Switch; the narrative skeleton exists only as a pretext and has no particular depth; the 3 forms that the protagonist can take are of nice design but offer little variety of use and application in terms of gameplay. We are sure that these results are the result of a limited concept level, but we are confident that some of the most problematic aspects could be solved with a better and more controversial selection of the target platform. Skully is therefore an unexpected title, but one that perhaps shows the best version of an idea that is already slightly incomplete.
► Skully is an Adventure-Platform game developed by Finish Line Games and published by Modus Games for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 04/08/2020
