When it comes to games that claim to be Souls-like in any sort of way, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m immediately skeptical. As I’ve said quite a few times, I’m not a huge fan of the titles to begin with, but also when it comes to others latching onto that description, they’re often either a completely janky mess with their combat, or they’re missing that spirit entirely and are just hoping to grab attention with the label. In the case of Skelethrone I’d say it’s somewhere in the middle, and on the whole it’s all over the place.

The first thing that baffled me out of the gate was the game’s overall look. I’ve obviously gotten quite accustomed to pixel art graphics, the low-poly look, and some other odd visual styles. In this case the game has a Frankensteined overall appearance that’s very odd though, and sometimes a bit distracting. Mixing together more rough pixel art for the action, what varies between static images and different pixel looks in the backgrounds, and then what appears to be an assortment of stock images for your inventory items and things like character portraits, the game is all over the place. One effect of this is that there were times where I had a hard time seeing places I could go, traps, or other elements since it all gets layered and hodge podged into one, but not always playing nicely together.

When you begin playing you’ll then find that while the various monsters you’ll be grappling with in combat are both quite repetitive and don’t really require all that much technique to tackle. You have a parry, but its timing and effectiveness are so limited that it doesn’t feel viable, and once you learn to use your roll or simply move out of the way of many attacks you’ll generally have plenty of success. As you go you’ll get new weapons to help you feel a bit more powerful, and those have some variations as well, but most of the combat ends up feeling a bit unrewarding, with it only getting tougher in boss fights or if enough enemies manage to get stacked on one another.

In the end, for the price this isn’t a terrible game, but it’s also pretty clearly flawed in a few areas. Perhaps if the pickings in the genre were more thin that wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but the fact is that the Switch is absolutely stacked with Metroidvanias, and some truly outstanding ones at that. While this may have a slight edge with a lower price in some cases, for a little more or if you wait for a sale the competition simply blows this effort out of the water on pretty well every level.