Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona

It's amazing that this is the work of a single person. It's a very nice game all-in-all.

I'd hate to go negative on a single dev project, but unfortunately the game is just way too janky to recommend it. I do not think it's a good buy even on sale. What makes it even more sad for me is that the game clearly has genuine effort and interesting ideas put into it. There are lots of things in the game that could have been great if they were better implemented. For example, character progression has some interesting ideas, but the split between the typical souls leveling and the skill tree leveling just doesn't make sense. The game has a variety of builds and weapons, but there no scaling, so you are forced to always go for bigger base damage. There are many small details like that all over the game. The art style is probably as close as something in this game get to being genuinely good. It's very cool and creative, and giving great dark fantasy vibes. The level design is also quite decent and the metroidvania element is enjoyable. The soundtrack is surprisingly good. The game works well on Steam Deck. That's where the clear positives end. Unfortunately, the game is very hard to enjoy due to *both* the combat and the platforming being incredibly janky. The combat feels s…

It's pretty bad sadly. - Inconsistent parries, sometimes they stagger sometimes they don't. Attacks generally have no weight behind them, feels pretty bad; - Map is terrible , very hard to see stuff on it (entries/exists), i got lost too much; - stats are poorly explained, translation is terrible in general; Art is cool i guess.

Phenomenal. I first bought this game on Xbox while it was on sale, then had to stop myself, and decided at the first boss I wanted to do a lets play of this game. Previously I could not care less about games of the Metroidvenia variety. I didn't think they were bad, just never felt drawn, but somehow Skelethrone really hooked me. The best way I can describe it compared to other titles is if Dark Souls were a 2D platformer. It's challenging, it visually looks like a darker, gritty world, and the combat can be quite satisfying once you get the hang of it. Controls feel simple overall but not in a clunky way. Beyond gameplay and control, the graphics are quite interesting. Dialogue shows a more realistic closeup of characters so that you can see exactly what they look like, and the more pixelated sprites seem to avoid losing too much detail, and add to the unease of certain environments/enemy movements. My ownly critique, if it can even be called that, is that while there are several armor sets in the game, none of them change the player's appearance. I wouldn't call this an issue, more so just a case of "it would be nice if it did." Even if you don't normally play metroidvania st…

Came to a realization that the only thing I liked about the game was SOME of the art (environments look cool but the player and enemy sprites look like total ♥♥♥♥) and ONE song that was wasted on an area with 4 rooms. Boring levels and atrocious combat, this dev cannot make bosses to save their life. One of the four bosses I fought wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't have one attack where it requires you to tediously dodge 10 slow moving projectiles in a row, I don't know why 4 or 5 wasn't enough because having to stop everything your doing for an attack that lasts that long makes the fight a total slog. During the platforming sections in the mushroom area, the mushrooms take a solid half second for their hitbox to turn on after they play their "you can stand on me now" animation and it was so unbelievably frustrating. It was the only area I saw with actual things in it, and it ended up being just a miserable time. Can't trick myself into liking this one, wish I just refunded it.

I thought it would be a normal metroidvania like blasphemous, but instead I got dark souls with the fact that I have to constantly watch the stamina bar and mobs almost never show when they attack so it's hard to counter that. I like hard games and challenges but this is not for me.