Skeler Boy Nintendo Switch Review 6.5/10 "a pop culture, pixel mystery" 🔦 @MANIACBOYSTUDIO #IndieGame #GameDev

Skeler Boy comes at us from Maniac Boy Studio, a Spanish studio that certainly know how to create a great-looking, atmospheric world, but lose some lustre due to a poor translation and some seemingly hurried concepts.

The titular Skeler is a young man searching for his missing girlfriend, Megan. Set purely at night, Skeler roams the city and surrounding locations in a bid to get to the bottom of what has happened to his girlfriend as he swirls further and further into a vortex of - possible – madness. It’s a simple and yet robust premise for some good old-fashioned creepiness in this top-down pixel adventure. 

The vast majority of the gameplay comes from discovering ways to move past certain obstacles, such as locating wire cutters for a fence, or working out how to get access to a boat to cross a river etc. the pacing is pretty solid, and the adventure will only take a couple of hours to see through to the end.

I’ll start with the positives, the pixel art is crisp and detailed, the fundamental mechanics are solid – and the audio really ties the whole thing together, with ambient atmospherics haunting your character as they make their way around moonlit forests and cavernous houses searching for keys and the like. The audio is surprisingly varied, and there are moments and areas where the music and sounds will drop out altogether, heightening the tension of a game that never reduces itself to constant jump scares, it’s clear that the slower-paced meanderings whereby you are drinking in the atmosphere of this little horror title are the best. 

On the flip side, there are some pretty gnarly issues that can’t be ignored, such as the tedious instant-death ‘action’ sections that crop up a handful of times and force you to return to the main menu, re-load your save, and then trudge through the same lead-up dialogue to the insta-death run without the possibility of skipping, it completely halts the fun and totally removes you from any immersion you may have had. The dialogue is also problematic, in that English is seemingly not the author’s first language, leading to a lot of awkward, stilted conversations, and occasionally – nonsensical non-sequiturs.

SUMMARY

A fun - if flawed – romp that can be completed in a single sitting - if, like me, you enjoy bite-size horror nuggets, this is certainly one to pick up at the price point it currently sits at. 

That said, there are a lot of issues in the dialogue and action sequences that can’t be glossed over and only serve to muddy what could have been a simple premise and execution. 

Hopefully some of these issues will be patched out in future updates, as there’s a fun title here from a developer that has certainly grabbed my attention.