Skellboy is an action-adventure game that doesn’t feel quite like anything I’ve ever played. Unfortunately, I mean that in the worst possible way. Setting aside the frame rate issues (which have been largely remedied by today’s 1.0.1 patch but still exist) that raise the immediate question of why Skellboy launched on the Nintendo Switch—a platform barely able to handle it—while the PC version lags behind with a vague “2020” release date, the gameplay is unbelievably clunky and prone to cheapness. Hit boxes are absurdly large, attacks lack any kind of satisfying weight behind them, boss fights are gimmicky to a fault, height is almost impossible to read because of the camera angle, and the screen is frequently so busy that it’s basically impossible to tell what damages you at certain points. Skellboy is a game where you can stand on a table above an enemy and take damage from an attack that visibly goes under it, and that’s barely scraping the surface of the bizarre gameplay decisions on display here.

You’re given categories of weapons that can be switched between with ZL and ZR, but can only carry one weapon of each category at a time. For better or worse, Skellboy has you constantly replacing your weapons. The same goes for the body parts that function as the game’s equipment; enemies will frequently drop their own body parts, allowing you to increase/decrease your HP and equip passive abilities such as the ability to stun enemies by landing after a jump. It’s easy to lose body parts, though. Their prevalence makes it easy to overlook something that an enemy knocked off of you when it jumped down and landed on your head, automatically equipping itself as a negative bonus.

Thus far, the platforming has been Skellboy‘s one bright spot. I wouldn’t consider it especially great considering that the camera angle doesn’t communicate the height of anything particularly well, but it’s functional. That’s more than can be said of the combat. Enemy tells aren’t good enough, which can be chalked up to the voxel-meets-Paper Mario art style forcing smaller enemies to communicate their attacks with a change of expression rather than a different kind of motion. This doesn’t mesh well when debris is flying every which way and making the screen busy.

And let’s talk about the boss fight toward the end of the video. You can see the expanding fire attack that it uses at 13:24 and what kind of jump evades said attack, so what the hell is going on at 13:30? At a glance, it looks like the boss shoots the fire to his left, where it hits the ground and expands, but what actually seems to happen is that it hits his head and expands in the air. As a result, jumping to avoid it means taking damage. You can’t read the height because of the camera angle and the attack’s lack of a shadow. You just have to wait for it to cross a wall and see if it stops or keeps going to figure out the height. This is an incredibly poor design decision that highlights Skellboy‘s underlying clumsiness.

Skellboy‘s performance was a major problem when I first started playing. The starting area regularly dipped down into the 10-20 FPS range. The only other Nintendo Switch game I’ve seen do that is Witch Thief, and even then, only when using a fully upgraded version of one of the weapons. It’s especially bad when you consider that Skellboy is aiming for 60 FPS. At launch, it could only hit that point in small, barren nooks of the starting area (which was supposedly the biggest problem area due to the fountain water at :44). 10-30 FPS was about what you could expect, and while it’d occasionally hit ~50 FPS, freezes almost always followed whenever new stuff streamed in. My respect to reviewers who finished the game like this.

On the bright side, the game was patched today and the fountain water is now gone. Skellboy‘s frame rate in the starting area now hovers in a much more stable 30-60 FPS range. There are still some minor freezes when new areas stream in, but it’s nevertheless a significant improvement over the nearly unplayable launch performance. Problems still exist, however, which you can see at the end of the video when I strike an enemy and the game locks up. It never did unfreeze. Eventually, I manually closed the game from the Switch menu, which predictably led to a long spinning wheel followed by a crash message. That’s pretty standard game crash behavior as far as the Nintendo Switch is concerned.

I started Skellboy up again to finish my frame rate comparison and didn’t experience a crash this time, nor have I experienced a crash in the 1-2 hours I’ve played since. Another thing I’ve noticed is that the point where the game freezes when streaming in new assets is different when you reach the area past the hedge maze (sadly, this freeze happened a couple seconds after the above recording ended). Overall, I’m impressed by the performance improvement. I don’t have a lot of hope for the quality of the underlying game given what I’ve seen, but forward progress is good.

Skellboy impressions + frame rate analysis (launch and 1.0.1) first appeared on Killa Penguin