Choose your path

Vampire Survivors-esque battler sets itself apart with great weapons, unique graphics.

You’re that little yellow guy in the center. Credit: Achromi

If you’ve played any number of RPGs, you probably know the skill tree as a break from the game’s core action. It’s a place to pause, take a breather, and scroll through a massive visual menu of upgrade options, considering which path of stat and ability tweaks best fits your character and your play style.

With Skigill, indie developer Achromi has taken that break-time menu and transformed it into the playing field for an intriguing Vampire Survivors-style roguelike. And while the Early Access game currently lacks the kind of deep content that will keep players coming back for a long time, it’s still a clever and engaging take on the genre that I haven’t been able to put down for long.

Clear the way, I need +5 armor!

Like Vampire Survivors and its many imitators, Skigill is all about navigating through waves of enemies that converge somewhat mindlessly on your position. The game automatically aims and deploys weapons to carve some safe space through what can be screens full of hazardous enemies, which leave behind coins as they explode in puffs of yellow smoke.

What sets Skigill apart is that skill-tree playing field, which lets you spend those coins on a wide variety of increasingly expensive stat upgrades simply by navigating yourself to the next icon-labeled dot on the branching tree under your feet. Unlike most RPGs, though, the game doesn’t pause at all while you’re picking up the next stat upgrade, meaning you have to stand still for a second or two to confirm your purchase while dozens of enemies continue to march ever closer.

Figuring out your next upgrade path while fighting off the hordes is an interesting challenge.

Credit: Achromi

Figuring out your next upgrade path while fighting off the hordes is an interesting challenge. Credit: Achromi

Finding that time and space can be harder than it sounds, especially late in a 10- to 15-minute run, when multi-layered marching walls of enemies often clog up some crucial upgrade paths. It also means you might be forced to take an upgrade you’re not very interested in just to open up a path to more useful branches further down the line.

The game does pause briefly when you step over a large treasure chest icon, giving you a brief respite to choose from six different weapon upgrades. The weapon variety here is one of the game’s greatest strengths at this point, ranging from area-of-effect explosions to arcing sword slashes to targeted line-of-sight piercing arrows to slow-rolling bombs that squash enemies before exploding.

The damage and performance of each weapon is tied directly to different underlying skill tree stats, though, so getting the right synergistic mix of damage boosting and protective rays of force is important to staying alive. When you do get that mix going, though, it’s incredibly satisfying to tear through screens full of enemies with nigh-unstoppable automated attacks.

Picking a new weapon offers your only brief respite.

Credit: Achromi

Picking a new weapon offers your only brief respite. Credit: Achromi

What’s yellow and black and red all over?

Aside from the skill tree playfield, Skigill sets itself apart with a strikingly monochrome visual style. Every enemy, weapon, and explosion in the game is rendered in a single shade of yellow, with careful black outlines to set them apart. The only occasional smears of color come in the form of those bright skill tree icons and a red outline highlighting nearby enemies that can damage you.

The stark presentation can threaten to be overwhelming at times, especially when nearly the entire screen descends into a mass of yellow pixels. But the simplicity of the colors also makes it easy to unfocus your eyes and instinctually plan a path away from the red and yellow threats and through to the safety of the inky black void.

Skigill also benefits from allowing players to speed up or slow down time with a quick tap of the shoulder buttons. This is a lifesaver for the tedium of the early parts of runs, when the enemies are coming in at a relative trickle and you don’t want to stand around for awhile waiting for the actual challenging part of the run.

Thankfully you can fast-forward through the early-run doldrums…

Credit: Achromi

Thankfully you can fast-forward through the early-run doldrums… Credit: Achromi

Where Skigill suffers most, for the moment, is in an overall lack of variety. The recent Early Access release only has three different playable characters and four different skill-tree maps. While they differ in some important ways, the options fall far short of the dozens of arcane unlockable options that can keep players coming back to a game like Vampire Survivors for dozens of hours.

For replayability, Skigill currently relies on a difficulty system that simply scales up the quantity and health of enemies alongside a secondary skill tree that lets you purchase more permanent upgrades from the main menu. Unfortunately, even at the higher difficulty levels, you’ll see the same four yellow-on-black enemies filling your immediate vicinity, with little in the way of interesting movement or attack patterns to mix things up.

The developers promise on Steam that Skigill will see at least three new characters “along with more weapons and build possibilities” as it goes from Early Access to a Version 1.0 launch. We’re happy to hear that, because even this limited, somewhat repetitive taste of the game has had us coming back for the fun take on an old RPG staple.

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.