Skully (PS4)
Skully is a little skull wrapped around a magical ball of clay. As you might imagine, he can’t quite do too much now that he lacks a skeleton. He can roll around, jump, and perhaps most important of all, he can help resolve an ongoing conflict between four beings who embody the elements.
The 3D platformer Skully starts with the small skull getting brought to life by Terry, the deity aligned with Earth whose powers seem ill-fit for the ongoing conflict on the island the four elementals occupy. The four elemental siblings once got along but are now at each other’s throats as they contend for the Life Heart. Should any one of them get their hands on it, their power would become far greater than the others, allowing them to reshape the wider world as they see fit. Terry doesn’t want to be part of this violent squabble and hopes that Skully can help escort the earthen man to his siblings for a chat, although Skully himself lacks any way to participate in these conversations since he can’t talk.
Skully’s story ends up a nice added element to the adventure, partly because the siblings can talk over large distances so often as you’re platforming around you can hear the elementals talk and get to know them better. The appearance of the siblings feels a bit more creative than one might expect from the well-worn road of basing human designs on the four classical elements. The water woman Wanda feels a little standard but still looks nice, but Terry looks and talks a bit like a hippie or surfer bro made of Earth. The wind deity Brent has a tornado pompadour and talks a mile a minute since he doesn’t need to take a breath, and Fiona’s dried magma dress is subtle compared to her afro of fire. Cutscenes often rely on still shots of the characters rather than animations, something that can feel a little stiff at times but also works well enough thanks to using strong posing and key shots to still allow the characters to be as expressive as their excellent voice work. Funnily enough though, Skully gets to break from this a bit, the little skull ball sometimes moving in a scene in a manner similar to stop motion. This actually can make him rather cute, his large eye sockets and crooked smile helped by little nods or happy hops so he still feels much simpler than the disagreeing deities but not just an observer of this conflict Terry’s brought him into.
When Skully’s adventure begins, at first all you really need to contend with is the way he moves. That ball of clay he’s wrapped around means he needs to roll to get where he wants to go, and movement in Skully manages to be a bit loose in a good way. Skully will want to a roll a bit after a jump or keep up his momentum, but you can pull back a fair bit and learning how to wrangle him isn’t too difficult. This 3D platformer will expect you to make many jumps onto small platforms, the small adjustments you make to avoid rolling off to your doom giving them their substance. At other times though, you might need to have Skully roll across ramps or tipped ground to maintain his speed so he doesn’t slide off, controlling him while moving quickly just as important. There are sometimes secrets that require scaling rocky mountainsides or making good use of your momentum too, but generally Skully lands in a nice spot of being reasonable to control when you just want to get around but navigation can be a challenge whenever the game wants you to work a bit for it.
As the adventure goes on and you start heading to meet with the other elemental siblings, you’ll start facing dangers unique to their domains. Brent’s winds ask you to not only cross precariously placed ramps and platforms more often, but do so while avoiding wind gusts with proper timing. Wanda has a fair few active dangers to consider, whipping tentacles, water spouts, and even actual enemies starting to deny you safe ground, and outrunning her flood asks you to move much more quickly than usual. The fiery Fiona’s lava areas are visually impressive but sort of just an elemental reimagining of familiar dangers, although lava is an instant kill compared to Skully sometimes having time to leap out of water before he perishes. One thing that remains true throughout the game’s length is that there are plenty of floating flowers to collect, many of these helping to show you the main path or incentivizing searching strange corners for hidden collectibles. Flowers only go towards unlocking concept art and PlayStation trophies so collecting them isn’t necessary, but they can add some extra challenge to levels like Wanda’s flood or make you take bigger risks in areas that might otherwise be innocuous. Once a flower is collected and you’ve hit a mud checkpoint it’s saved for good though, meaning if you are willing to replay a level, you can always go back and grab the ones you missed rather than fussing over trying to grab them all when there might be some time pressure, and they do at least make the game a bit more difficult if you want to collect them since Skully’s movement isn’t always tested in the most engaging ways.
If all you did was roll around and jump, Skully would probably get stale rather quickly, but Terry can help you out by gradually granting you the use of some clay golems. When you’re at the mud puddles that serve as checkpoints, you’ll be able to sink into them and emerge inside an earthen figure with some unique abilities. The strong body is able to smash things and is the only one who can hurt enemies, the antler form can double jump, and the speedy form unfortunately does not make much interesting use of its sprint since it rarely has reason to and sometimes the double jump of the antler form can clear the gaps that might have been meant for you to cross with a running jump. Down the line though these forms can get new powers, the main manifestation of this being to be able to magically move specific rocky platforms around. While this can be used to give you stepping stones, it gets a bit more complicated when the game has you making aerial staircases. When you are done using a form, Skully can pop right out, but if they are using their magic power to make a stone float in the air, the body will keep doing so until you reenter it. You can have up to three bodies out at once, and Skully uses this idea to give you small puzzles where you need to figure out how to arrange these stones to get to out of reach areas.
While this does engage a more logical part of the brain after the game otherwise relies mostly on motor skills, it can feel quite fiddly due to a few realities of its design. Rolling back to mud puddles to lug a clay body over to contribute can get tedious, as can trying to get the elevations of rock platforms just right so another body can hop aboard with their often limited jump height. Sometimes you’ll just be slowly dragging one rock in front of the one you’re on, hopping onto it, dragging the previous one in front, and repeating that process, it not exactly mentally engaging to do such a simple and slow task. Later though, you’ll even start needing to drag light sources around a dark cave to avoid falling into muck, something that again feels more like work rather than a robust challenge. There are moments where it does feel like a true puzzle where figuring out the solution is satisfying, but at other moments it lacks strong direction so it ends up a slower way to get around and less rewarding than just rolling about as the little bone ball.
THE VERDICT: Skully provides a beautiful little world to roll around in, with some nice music to boot and some fun characters to structure its story around. The platforming as the skull ball works fairly well even if it’s not iterated on in extravagant ways, but complications can sometimes be where Skully stumbles. The clay golems give you new ways to interact with the world, but while this leads to some clever puzzles, it can just as often slow things down as navigation can be made more tedious without becoming more interesting.
And so, I give Skully for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. Skully’s voice actors, Ian Ronningen as Terry and Paul van Dyck as Brent in particular, make what could have been a standard plot about elements in turmoil a great deal more interesting and memorable, especially since the world design isn’t always able to explore the elements as well as the character designs do. Skully encounters some decent resistance when moving around in skull form and the clay golems at first feel like a sound addition, needing to navigate with care as they have specific limits but still give you new options for exploring the game’s 18 levels. When the special powers start to get a bit overplayed though, the puzzle-solving starts to weigh on the game more than it helps. Skully does feel like it needed to evolve beyond that ball rolling, but fussing over whether a platform is a few inches too high or too far and trudging between bodies and mud pools loses its luster and makes exploring for secrets less tantalizing to boot. The flowers being optional was likely the wise choice, trying to grab them all while avoiding rising lava would be aggravating if you couldn’t come back and try again later, and there are some that are incredibly well hidden that would be painful to miss if you couldn’t just sweep it all up at your leisure. At the same time, Skully feels like it could use more rewarding extras to encourage curiosity or at least put some more substantial challenges on the main path. Simply getting around as the bone ball at least requires constant but not exhaustive management to keep you somewhat engaged, but it feels like the game dabbles in a lot of ways to interact with the world but never pushes any of them to their limit.
Skully’s adventure still remains pretty approachable despite not realizing its potential. The story is made more interesting by giving the siblings character, Skully’s movement makes even simple platforming a bit involved, and even when it’s tedious, it’s not often going to be that difficult unless you want to grab every flower out there. Developer Finish Line Games was previously responsible for Maize, a game with little gameplay substance and writing that can get a bit excruciating to listen to, so this is a clear jump up in quality, and perhaps their next game will be yet another leap forward. Skully has a lot of care put into parts of its design that helps you overlook its puzzle problems, its foundations a fine clay that could be shaped into something even better with a sequel.