It’s been well over a year since I last used this “gradual impressions” format, but I’m bringing it out of retirement because I’m pretty sure that The Skylia Prophecy is damaging my mental health. I need witnesses to this insanity because I’ve thrown myself at an absurdly difficult (and hilariously unfair) brick wall of difficulty for half an hour, which feels like 100 times that because I’m pretty sure that this game breaks the space-time continuum. When I first discovered this game, I remember thinking to myself that it was destined to turn out either incredible or awful, so imagine my surprise when both ended up being the case. The Skylia Prophecy is one of those games where you can see the brilliant indie-auteur touches, but also the many ways that same attitude goes horribly and preventably awry, leading to disaster.
My very first impressions of The Skylia Prophecy were unreservedly negative as I discovered that the F12 key opens some webpage inspector tab, forcing me to use my GPU screenshots that show prompts when I’m recording video. Shortly after that, it became apparent that the beginning cutscene full of back story is automatically skipped when you press anything. I had to restart the game and then wait for the slow text scroll to move to a section I hadn’t yet seen, then quit out and repeat the process over and over again to capture the story. The story is basically “something something demon king, you screwed up and unleashed evil, and now you’re possibly going to screw up again trying to fix the initial screwup.” I’m down with that.
Nothing is ever explained to you. You might get a nudge from the randomized hints in the item menu, but you have to figure out for yourself that your shield damages Enemies. Since you can’t attack low, you have to rely on your shield to damage crawling enemies that your normal attack can’t reach. This is one of those touches that I like; in theory, you can get close to enemies and spam your shield since it doesn’t have a long animation like your normal attack. In practice, however, enemies do a ridiculous amount of touch damage to you, so there aren’t many situations where you can get away with this. Still, it’s interesting. Also interesting? Defeated enemies remain dead forever. That’s not common in gaming, and I love it.
The madness begins early, though, and I’ve started to go through indivisible doors. Pressing up against walls where doors might be works sometimes. And sometimes, platforms don’t appear to be platforms, with the parts you can walk on not corresponding to the sprites. At the end of the video above, I walk back through a door to try something before dropping down and losing that option, only to get stuck after being warped off-screen. Possibly into a wall. This isn’t what I’d consider an ideal first impression.
I’ve beaten two bosses thus far—A+ pacing thus far, which is important to me, though I’m not okay with how some doors are one-way-only and force you to leave behind content by accidentally progressing—and they’ve been challenging but fair. You can carry one health potion, one mana potion, and one invincibility potion at a time (and you have to purchase them despite not always having enough money), and the balance feels just about right. For some reason, though, a rare enemy type has started appearing who’s inexplicably harder than bosses. It’s a giant spider with a woman’s nude torso, so I’ve (not-so-affectionately) come to refer to her as Miss Spiderboob. She’s becoming a real thorn in my side.
The problem is her collision box, which doesn’t seem to correspond to her actual sprite. This doesn’t combine well with the absurd amount of touch damage you take if she touches you. It’s a one-hit kill, as far as I can tell. If you’re close enough to land an attack on Miss Spiderboob, she’s close enough to kill you.
On the bright side, the buggy doors and floors seem to have been resolved. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but at least I can see where all of the doors are now. Life is all about the small victories.
I only just realized that blocking blue projectiles from enemies drains my mana. For the longest time, I thought that I was taking damage because The Skylia Prophecy was bugging out and not registering my shield, but it’s just another mechanic that wasn’t ever explained. I’m not thrilled with having to avoid using my shield against some enemies to preserve mana, and that’s doubly the case since I recently beat an extra-annoying boss and unlocked a double-jump ability that costs one point of mana to use. You waste mana every time you double jump. Unlocking new movement abilities shouldn’t feel like a punishment.
Another thing—that boss was at the end of a long, same-y teleport maze. I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt have cause to say it again in the future: teleport mazes are lazy, awful contrivances that exist solely to pad out games. I’ve still barely scratched the surface of my problems with The Skylia Prophecy, too; I keep accidentally reaching new areas and leaving optional quests behind, which means that I enter new areas with little health and not enough money to heal myself or buy new items. Right now, I’m relying almost entirely on the full-heal you get when you defeat enough enemies to earn an extra hit point.
The Skylia Prophecy has pretty much completely fallen apart now. My last boss fight consisted of a guy just walking toward me and summoning enemies, and the trick was apparently to hit them a bunch to knock them back into chains. If you get touched by these chains, you instantly die and get a weirdly fetishistic (and NSFW) game over screen. If you knock them into the chains, you get that same screen that shows you tied up with your character’s breasts hanging out (even if you knock the guy boss into them), but then teleport to the top of the screen and fall back into the fight without losing health. Hello again, madness.
Whatever. I got past that boss and the room exit disappeared, meaning I was once again abandoning everything I hadn’t yet finished up to move to a new area, and this area is a large mess of enemies where the goal seems to be breaking certain statues on the wall to open up the path forward. Most rooms look the same, though, so finding the rooms with statues is exhausting. I’m currently stuck and considering giving up on The Skylia Prophecy for two intersecting reasons. First, the whole area counts as one big area rather than new rooms counting as a room transition, which means that enemies are active and move around in rooms, causing them to collide with you the second you enter some rooms. Again, you take a crazy amount of damage from contact. Oh, and saves don’t reset since there are no room transitions to trigger their reset, so you can’t kill a couple of annoying enemies and run back to lock their deaths in.
Secondly, I’m stuck having to get past two Miss Spiderboobs in a row, as well as one flying enemy who keeps swooping me at full speed and insta-killing me. Miss Spiderboob is the main problem, though, as always, and having to beat two in a row simply isn’t happening. The hitboxes just don’t work properly. Here’s the frame before my final death in the video above. In the frame after that where my character has instantly been killed, Miss Spiderboob hasn’t moved. She can, though—for some reason, she can move and shoot at the same time or lurch one of her legs forward. If you can damage her, she can instantly kill you. Fighting two of these things in a row isn’t reasonable. I’m going to spend a couple of days working on other games and waiting to see whether or not The Skylia Prophecy gets a patch to address this before launch. If it does, I’ll try to finish. If not, I’ll just review it as-is and give it a 0/3 in the gameplay category.
The Skylia Prophecy gradual impressions first appeared on Killa Penguin
