I’ve played many roguelikes, all promising something new. It has to be said that the concept of playing as the detached skeletal head of an immortal fleshy body is certainly a new one. In Skull Horde you fight through dungeons to find your body, so that you might revoke its accursed fleshyness and be one in boney goodness – because as the introduction says…
FLESH IS TEMPORARY
BONE IS FOREVER
More than just an auto-battler, but not as deep as an RTS game
Playing as just a skull, you aren’t exactly equipped to deal with hordes of demonic rats, oozing slimes and slimy oozes — to that end you summon an increasingly powerful horde of skeletal and undead minions. As a player you only have access to a basic auto-firing projectile, a rally ability to summon your troops, and one single active ability unique to each skull.
Over the course of a run you spend coins in shops to hire minions, stacking duplicates to upgrade them. The limited slots for minion types makes managing which brand of skeletal gribbly you choose important, as once your slots are full you’ll have to sacrifice every minion of a type to switch it to another. For example, if you invest heavily in your starting archers but then want to switch them out for Ballistas later in a run, you have to remove all your archers to do so. Of course, you could pre-emptively keep a slot open for the Ballistas, but then will you even make it far enough to see them?
This risk/reward gameplay permeates almost every aspect of Skull Horde, and is the main reason the learning curve is so steep…
Every 30 seconds the game gets harder, so keep up
Beyond just managing your minions, Skull Horde doubles-down on risk/reward with the Threat Level system. Every 30 seconds, from the moment you start a run, the difficulty increases. This seemingly presents two approaches:
- Run like hell to each floor’s portal, only looting what is immediately in your way and doing no side challenges. This way, by the time you get to the boss your threat level is low, so your unoptimised team might stand a chance…
- Scout every floor entirely doing every bit of content as you find it. Chests, challenges, killing mobs and using optional shops. By the time you get to the boss you might be at threat level “Hell”, but at least you’ll have a bag full of relics and an army you’ve optimised for purpose.
Realistically, it’s knowing when to invest time into a floor and when to nope the hell out that makes or breaks a run. If you get to a miniboss “elite” enemy blocking a portal and you don’t have some heavy hitting Slayer type minions then you’ll spend more time killing that one enemy than exploring all the previous floors would have taken.
Not only does that mean more threat level increases, but these increases are happening during an Elite fight, making it exponentially harder to win. Getting bogged down with an elite takes time, and time means the hourglass cycles over and over, making the rest of the run considerably harder.
Specialised units encourage diverse army rosters and add replayability
I won’t lie, I found the 30 second timer very harsh. As someone who loves the minion management side and wanted to have a max-dodge counter-attack army of Dancers, it was a shame that the strict timer made those sorts of one-track builds completely non-viable. To win with any degree of certainty you need diversity in your team.
I had assumed, in my hubris, that most units with weapons would deal similar damage, most units with shields or dodge would tank similarly well and that units with buffs or heals were purely for those purposes. I was half-right, but thankfully the post-game screen illuminated where I was going wrong…
The spearman units I was using to immobilise and stab at enemies were doing between 10 and 20 damage. They are a “Vanguard” unit, good at creating a battleline. What I hadn’t realised is the axe-wielding Cleavers that hunt enemies with high HP deal as high as 80 damage. I’d read the text box so had seen they dealt “more”, and had seen the “Slayer” role (Rather than “Vanguard”) so assumed a damage increase — but this was more than just a small increase. The Slayer was dealing 8x as much damage per hit. If I had invested in them sooner, they could have filled the damage gap in my army.
Once I understood the differences in specialisations were so huge, I started to make much more balanced and viable teams.
Difficulty options that genuinely innovate
After throwing a couple more skulls into dungeons and unlocking the next two regions, I was still finding myself feeling restricted. The 30 second escalation timer was just too much, and was forcing me to play a specific way that I wasn’t in the mood for. I did the unthinkable (I’m a From Software boy at heart) and opened the difficulty menu.
There is an option to simply decrease the difficulty, making enemies weaker universally. However, much more interestingly, there are two distinct other ways to tweak the game’s difficulty.
Firstly, you can raise the Threat timer to 40 or 50 seconds rather than the base 30. This might sound like a small increase, but over the course of a 10 minute run that’s the difference between reaching Threat level 20 or Threat level 12. This option doesn’t change anything about the scaling, rewards, progress or mechanics — it just pops the timer up a few seconds to give you some breathing room. If you can get to the final room by Threat level 12 with 30 second increases then more power to you, but the wiggle-room was just what I needed.
The second, and completely game-changing, difficulty option in Skull Horde is called “Explorer Mode”. This assigns each area of the dungeon a pre-set Threat level. It also stops infinitely spawning enemies (as these spawns were tied to the timer, and the timer no longer exists). This game mode means you will always have the same threat level on the same floor of a dungeon, and in general have had the same amount of resources to prepare for that floor. The fact a game so fundamentally built around time management makes removing the timer an option, and does so with this much grace, is eye-opening.
Simple commands would go a long way to making the timer feel fair
Even with the difficulty tuned, it’s unfortunate that there isn’t more control over your hordes when it comes to moment-to-moment gameplay. You can drag them around the map by holding “Rally” which makes them follow your skull. You can release an active ability when they’re all grouped up for maximum buff coverage. Beyond that, though, your options are limited. I found myself wishing I could Rally not just at the location of my skull, but at the location of my cursor. This would be in-keeping with the theme of the game while giving you just that little extra bit of autonomy needed to manage larger boss fights or challenging encounters.
Without that level of agency, most fights are won purely in the numbers. Either you’ll have enough HP, damage and ressummoning speed to outlast the enemy…or you won’t. While there’s a multitude of summon types and buffs and synergies, they all exist in a system that is more auto-battler than real-time strategy. The game cares that you get to a floor quickly, with just the right investment in your units, rather than about how you actually place or lead those units.
Great for seasoned roguelike vets or someone who just likes skeletons
The variations in difficulty, game mode and build options for your army of undead do make Skull Horde stand out against the backdrop of roguelike survivors-adjacent games on the market. The introduction of the 30 second escalation timer as well as hugely specialised unit types like the Vanguard and Slayer ensures you aren’t left feeling like there’s nothing to do, despite the hands-off nature of being a summoner.
Skull Horde is available now on Steam
