Skyhill

Skyhill has an interesting premise, but its systems are ultimately too simple in design to provide any compelling choices during gameplay. The overall lack of progression or variety makes replaying it after completing it once feel pointless.

A game should never start you out in an unwinnable situation. It sounds obvious, I know, but after a few playthroughs of Skyhill, I found myself thinking the same thing: that no matter how well I play, no matter what I do, I’ll still lose the majority of the time and that frustrates me. If my actions ultimately don’t matter as much as the random number generator does, why bother playing at all?

But still, it’s undeniably repetitive. I like the game a lot, and in a large part because of its simplicity. But it’s certainly walking a fine line, possibly limiting how many times someone might want to take another trip down its randomly generated tower knowing they’ve encountered many of its surprises.

That said, when you get right down to the core of it, see how the elements work in your favour or conspire against you, Skyhill admirably creates this tense game of hubris and courage, one that never lets up until you escape or, far more likely, die.

Ultimately, Skyhill brings to mind 11-bit Studios seminal survivalist opus This War of Mine, though in doing so it invites comparisons it can’t possibly survive as the former feels much more reduced in scope and flair than the latter. While entertaining for the most part then, Skyhill’s ease of play and encouragingly gentle roguelike mechanics are not quite enough to allow the game to reach the ambitious heights of the structure that it takes as its namesake.

Skyhill’s biggest flaw is its lack of merits. It’s, technically speaking, a decently designed survival game, but neither its RPG elements nor the story nor the atmosphere are entertaining enough to keep the players engaged.