Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Review

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona is a Metroidvania-style game mixed with an often brutal soulslike combat style. In the opening hours, you often get one-shotted by nearly everything and must be extremely patient. Once the game opens up, it is rewarding, fun, and a grand entry if you are looking for a good challenge. We were often frustrated with the controls or when a single mistake put us back at the checkpoint, however. Let’s take a deeper look.

Atmosphere & Level Design

Skelethrone nails a grim, oppressive atmosphere, clearly inspired by Dark Souls. From hauntingly beautiful areas to sadistic traps and varied zone designs, its world is immersive, if not overwhelmingly bleak. The soundtrack and environmental design enhance this sense of hopelessness, making for a strong aesthetic experience despite occasional visual clutter and confusing elements that obscure important features. This is a 2D soulslike, and often art elements can obscure an enemy’s telegraphed attacks, which leads to your instant death.

Combat & Gameplay

Combat is tough and methodical, requiring patience and careful timing. While the boss fights can feel infuriating at times, they remain mostly rewarding, although regular enemies might catch you off guard more often than expected. You can “farm” some areas, but even dozens of levels in, I would still be terribly grabbed by the enemy for a one-shot hit. There are various weapons and an upgrade system, but the game lacks build flexibility and can feel stiff. The shield is great if you can time the parry, but the window for this feels terrible, and simply blocking doesn’t absorb enough attack. It is often better to do the soulslike classic and spam dodge while two-handing a cleaver or running a bow and sword. Your character can be armed with bows, scythes, longswords, whips, pistols, rifles, and many more traditional weapons.

Hitboxes and clunky controls further detract from the experience, and introducing soft checkpoints (lanterns) does help smooth progress. We highly recommend persisting and experiencing more than the frustrating starting area. There are some pretty brutal 2D games out there, and this is up top, but couple that with some extremely clunky controls and uninteresting exploration, and I often wanted more.

Story & Narrative

The weakest aspect of Skelethrone is its narrative. The story feels incoherent, with writing that clashes with the grim tone. It’s hard to follow, making it difficult to get invested in the characters or plot. A specific mid-game segment where you’re forced to fight multiple bosses in a Mortal Kombat-style arena is bizarre and disrupts the game’s flow entirely. It was at this point I contemplated giving up for something more richly designed and fun to play. A game does not have to be all brutal all the time.

Multiple endings are shaped by your decisions during story beats, and with the variety of weaponry there is enough for multiple playthroughs.

Visuals & Sound Design

The art style is decent, with gothic, grim environments that capture the spirit of Soulslikes. However, stiff animations and confusing visual cues often lead to frustration, such as enemies blending into the background. Similarly, the sound design lacks weight, with weak impact sounds during combat, making fights underwhelming.

Overall Experience

While Skelethrone borrows heavily from Soulslikes and Metroidvania, it struggles to create its own identity. Despite this, it still offers a fairly enjoyable experience for fans of challenging dark fantasy games, provided you can overlook its narrative shortcomings, clunky combat, and occasional design missteps. It’s a decent value for its price, but not without some frustration along the way. Overall, it’s a fun title that forces you to adapt and be extremely precise or suffer again and again. Gamers who are fans of this genre and challenge will really enjoy this title. If you are not already a fan of the souls-like style, then it might be best to enter into the genre with another title.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co