The Haunted Hoard: Everybody Loves Skeletons (PC)

Much like fellow indie game Aliens Don’t Exist, Everybody Loves Skeletons is a 2D platformer whose name inspires a degree of curiosity, and much like Aliens Don’t Exist, the title doesn’t ever receive an explanation. There is only one well-dressed skeleton featured in the game, and while the title of the game certainly could be backed up by the memetic appeal of skeletons and their frequent use as a symbol of the Halloween season, here it just seems like an idle thought the developer had that ended up becoming the game’s title.

You may be inclined to think the story provides something to latch onto in regards to the title, and this is usually the segment of a review where I’d speak about it to give the reader the foundation they need to understand the rest of the game experience… but there isn’t one. The lack of a story is a fact the developer seems quite candid about on Steam. The closest thing we can glean is the dapper skeleton we’re playing as wants to get to the castle at the end of the game, his adventure through graveyards, forests, swamps, and caves all leading up to that final level, but then the game seems to wrap-up rather quickly as he leaves the castle for some other unknown destination. A plot isn’t necessary in a video game, but the deliberate avoidance of one here is almost charming.

The platforming is the bread and butter of Everybody Loves Skeletons, and while that phrase is often used to indicate a foundational aspect of a work of media, here it could also capture how plain most of the play feels since it’s only using fairly basic platforming challenges. Despite changing up its backdrops quite a bit across your adventure, the platforming in Everybody Loves Skeletons isn’t very imaginative. A lot of can be described as either the ground, floating blocks, or pillars that have small gaps between them, the act of jumping across the pit too simple to really serve as much of a challenge. Sure, a drop might send you to an earlier part of the often vertical levels or you might just land on spikes or in acid, but it feels like a lot of jumping for jumping’s sake. There are a few small moments of interesting level traversal, things like needing to cut spiderwebs holding boxes to make your platforms or riding a log out across acid shaking up the structure, and some levels will include actually difficult platform arrangements for optional content, but not enough thought was put into making these jumps enjoyable to execute. There is a late game addition in the form of a grappling hook, but its somewhat clumsy physics and limited implementation means it doesn’t really have a chance to improve your last few levels with the game.

Enemies will sometimes linger on the platforms up ahead, adding the small consideration of needing to time your jump so you won’t hit them, but the enemies in Everybody Loves Skeletons are an odd bunch both aesthetically and mechanically. Spiders, zombies, and even slimes feel like they match the horror backdrops, but then you start facing strange porcupine creatures, a nearly roasted exploding chicken, and a weird orange horned creature that shows another problem with the enemy design, that being their appearance. While our unnamed skeletal protagonist looks top notch and the slimes seem like enough love was put into drawing them, a lot of other enemies look out of place. The porcupine creatures are odd faces with spikes bursting out of their necks, the orange horned creatures are pretty much colored lumps with faces, the spiders seem like they were made in Microsoft Paint, and the zombies especially look amateurish whereas the others could potentially pass as just strange design decisions. Their unusual appearances don’t make them worse as foes, but they do have a few little issues. Despite having a few different attack types themselves to make them decently varied, you mostly deal with them by smacking them with your cane. Some enemies can be whacked repeatedly, others will become invincible for a hard to read period to your next swing, and some can only be hit from certain angles when they feel like it, the porcupine especially being prone to hit detection issues. There are no bosses or incredibly strong enemies, but to land safely on some platforms you do have to smack the foe as soon as you land to avoid damage, something that is hampered by their odd relationship with your cane hits.

There are a few moments Everybody Loves Skeletons breaks away from simple jumping. The main one is when you find a small area your head must navigate through. Our protagonist can pop off his skull any time to explore as a fairly mobile head, still able to attack with what looks like a little yell, but its segments aren’t too creative either. Kill enemies, hop over gaps, and flip whichever switch or lever needs to be activated to help the main body along. The gun you get later struggles to find purchase as well, both as a platforming aid and enemy killing tool. The ammo it holds is limited so you might need to hang onto it for the very few shooting targets that appear, although the game does place some around areas it is absolutely required. Even if you do choose to shoot enemies with the assurance there will be ammo when it’s needed, you have very few bullets and they don’t instantly kill every enemy. Some enemies hanging out on a small platform might be good to shoot with it, but it’s hardly worth the trouble whipping it out to aim it. Health achieves a pretty decent scarcity balance to make you want to be careful to avoid being set back by a death, but your gun isn’t really versatile enough to help where the unreliable cane would still be better due to not relying on ammo or locking you in place like the gun aiming does.

There is one more aspect to this mostly lean platforming experience, and that’s the upgrade table. Later levels contain a workbench where you can spend coins you collected along your journey, these most often coming from the corpses of defeated enemies. Incentivizing the cane combat probably isn’t the best idea, but whacking enemies for cash is at least something to do outside of simple jumping challenges and mild platforming puzzles. A lot of the times cash is likely to fall down pits or onto spikes, but to get a huge chunk of change quickly, the player can find one of the few secrets hidden around levels, those being the bags of coins that often require a bit more keyboard dexterity to jump to safely. An achievement marks them as a collectible to chase, but there’s no real way to know how many you have collected outside your own memory. Levels don’t communicate points of no return well either and can wrap up at odd points, sometimes transitioning to the next in strange ways like in the endgame hub-like area where going down a hall or jumping up through a gap can suddenly cut to a sublevel. If you do gather enough coins for upgrades though, they are useful perks, such as powering up your cane smack, adding greater ammo capacity to your gun, and upping your max health, so at least this side task to simply making forward progress provides some incentive to deviate from the plain platforming for some small but helpful rewards.

THE VERDICT: It’s hard to love Everybody Loves Skeletons. An almost entirely basic platformer through and through, the few changes away from vanilla jumping challenges aren’t stark enough to really pull you away from a game that has very little going on in it. Some of the things it does include are slightly awkward like the enemies, art style, and the cane’s hit detection, so with very little interesting to latch onto, it ends up a mostly forgettable game that barely lasts an hour.

And so, I give Everybody Loves Skeletons for PC…

A BAD rating. An apt simile would be comparing Everybody Loves Skeletons to a pair of glasses with a few cracks around the edges of the lens. They do achieve the basics of what is expected of them but nothing more, and the few flaws, while not interfering with that too much, linger where you can’t help but be constantly reminded of their presence. The fundamentals of a platformer are here and certain aspects are done competently, but little niggling annoyances make it hard to walk away with a positive impression. The core gameplay, when it isn’t stumbling from issues like the bland level layouts, underutilization of mechanics, or odd detection issues, doesn’t provide anything strong to form an opinion around, so the negatives stand out amidst the backdrop of an otherwise generic game.

Imagination and implementation are the missing parts of this game’s skeletal structure. When it has new ideas to add to the gameplay, it doesn’t implement them enough to make them stand out, and what it does include is often simply functional at best and slightly janky at worst. Much like Aliens Don’t Exist it’s can only really leave an impression with its issues, but if Everybody Loves Skeletons had more meat on its bones, perhaps then it could flesh out the experience enough to be worthy of love.