Wow! I love this game's visuals! The music is vibrant, the combat has weight, and the items are super interesting! Let's see what else it has to offer!

Haha, I just died. Okay. Let's restart.

40 minutes later

This game is so FUCKING ugly. The combat is SO FUCKING BAD I hate this STUPID ASS SKELETON. FUCK.

Although it begins strongly, it regrettably loses its appeal because half of the forms are not enjoyable to use, there is too much grinding even for rogue-lite standards, and the boss battles lack excitement. The world is intriguing, and I appreciate the idea of playing as the villain to defeat the heroes, but the story itself lacks the charm to keep me engaged.

I didn't find it painful at all, and I actually had some fun with it. However, I couldn't bring myself to complete a run for this one compared to Dead Cells or Hades. It's an okay game.

I am sad to report that Skul did not do it for me. Possibly could be my fault because I thought it was a Metroidvania. I thought I remember reading about this one before it came out and that's what it was, but I could be thinking of something else.
Skul: The Hero Slayer is actually a roguelike with a very cool idea: change your head to get different movesets and abilities. Please keep in mind that the following opinions are based only on a pretty short playthrough during which I got through the first area including beating the first major boss.

Gameplay
Combat mechanics are conceptualized well, but I didn't like the feeling of the dash. It felt severely underpowered. The character control is also a bit touchy in terms of movement. Could have done with a slight reduction in movement speed or a very small amount of acceleration time to make it feel smoother.
The main complaint is this regard is unfortunately the biggest part of the game. The encounters are long-winded and repetitive. Get ready to hit the attack button a lot. Luckily, I have a 3rd part controller that has a turbo button so I can just hold down the button to make the character attack repeatedly. If this was not the case, I likely would have quit playing after the first day. Enemies have too much health and most areas will spawn multiple waves. At the same time, most of them don't pose any real threat because most are staggered by your attacks. So there is not often a need to dodge or maneuver, just press the attack.
The core concept of changing character classes based on the heads you find is a very good one and I can't imagine how much work went into the design, visually and mechanically, of all these different character options. The only problem is that none of them make the above complaints ok. There also might be some balancing issues with them. Some of them seem very weak and not really capable of much, but when I was able to beat the first major boss, it is because I had a rare head that was very strong and just kind of melted everyone that I came across. Turned the first boss from a very tough skill-check to a trivial, effortless encounter.

Story
The story did seem interesting. Humans are attacking the skeletons and other monsters of the woods and Skul has to go stop them and liberate the Demon King's castle. There are some snippets of story given piecemeal as well, so I'm sure it would have expanded beyond that.

Characters
All the characters I met seemed to have personality and charm.

Art
The art is excellent and definitely my favorite part of the game! Again, I am impressed by the work that went into all the class designs and the environments and enemies all look great too.

Music
The music was nice but very simplistic and didn't really have much excitement to it.

Skul is a top-tier roguelike. Addictive, fast-paced and challenging gameplay with tons of items and Skul character variants with different skills for a variety of build options and combinations, really cool boss design and solid OST as well. For a roguelike, a genre that typically doesn't focus much on story, Skul does have a pretty decent story about an inter-political struggle between demons and humans with some good twists and emotional moments too. All in all the game was lots of fun and very reminiscent of Dead Cells, but more linear and not metroidvania-like.

My biggest complaint is while the game has over 90 different Skuls to use, a LOT of them just aren't useful because the game isn't balanced the best and there's some pretty big difficulty spikes in the later levels so you will rely on a small handful for the endgame and since it's a game based on RNG like any other roguelike not getting the proper Skul can really make or break a run. Still a super fun game regardless though and if you enjoy roguelikes or a good challenging game with fast-paced and fluid gameplay I'd recommend it.

Some of the most fun I've ever had playing a game for the first time. The soundtrack is phenomenal, the gameplay is smooth and fast paced, the story is pretty good with a decent cast of characters, and the art style is beautiful. My favorite part is the enormous variety of skulls. I'd say there are over 100 skulls. About 36 standalone skulls but each skull has multiple awakenings that upgrade the abilities of said skull. Every skull plays like a unique and different class with their own design, passive abilities, active abilities, and like I said before, awakenings.The boss fights are difficult but get even more difficult the further you progress. It gets even harder if you try to 100% the game and you have to complete every boss fight without getting hit once. Overall the game is an absolute blast and probably in my top 5 favorite games of all time. Also the art is just so amazing

Pros:
+ fresh setting with a unique swap mechanic
+ combat system is varied and transform mechanic offers a large variety of options
+ visuals are perfectly fine and the music is okay
+ some memorable NPCs and funny writing

Cons:
- economy is completely busted: meta-upgrades take forever to unlock
- bosses are brick walls that can only be beaten by grinding for meta-upgrades
- bosses have no variety, you will fight the first boss more times than you can count
- action frequently gets confusing
- difficulty is generally high but differs wildly between stages
- head upgrade mechanic is often useless due to lack of resources
- usefulness of heads differs wildly, with many being unfit for boss fights
- important mechanics are largely unexplained ingame (inscriptions, gate codings, buffs)
- skills don't reset between maps
- status screen is cluttered and confusing to navigate
- "enemy gained XP from your defeat" message is just plain idiotic

Playtime: Roughly 8 hour, which is really more than enough.

Blagic Moment: Not playing for a few days and realizing that you only return for more grinding and little else.
Best Head: Werewolve. One of the more useful ones.

Verdict:
Although Skul tries hard to add something fresh to the genre, this rogue-lite is a middling, time-consuming affair that will frustrate you far more than it will reward you. The endless repetition of stages, level set-ups and bosses combined with brick wall bosses make for a huge slog, and the innovative head swapping mechanic and exciting combat are simply not enough to elevate this one from the deluge of similar - and often better - games of the past few years.

I decided to abandon this after reaching the penultimate boss and felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Only play this if you have the time for it, because this game does not respect it - or better yet, chose a better game from the dozens of options out.

Yeah... I've tried a few times now and, while this isn't a bad game by any means, I'm just not really vibing with it at all. The base combat is kinda boring and simplistic, as the diversity and depth is supposed to come from the various skulls you can obtain, but I've only found a few really fun skulls and a bunch of boring ones. Items seem overcomplicated and and pretty boring too, and this is one of those slow dripfeed games where metaprogression takes an eternity because it's +4% this and +6% that. On top of all that, I'm not really feeling the aesthetics and find especially the environment graphics to be quite dull and uninspiring. I will now accept that this game is not for me even though some love it, stop trying to find enjoyment in it and uninstall it once and for all.

when i bought skull i played it non stop, i've been playing for the last 10 days and i have 20 hours, and i can't get myself to play it again, so let's go for the review

to start with the good things, the ost is awesome, and the skull changing mechanics are so enjoyable and cool to use

in the bad part, there is no method of healing in boss rooms, and bosses smash your skull with ease, there are just a few characters and they are so so bland

and all the rest of good and bad points are just opposittes

the graphics are really good, but the graphic design is SO GENERIC oh my god

the gameplay is fun, hard and quick, but after 20 runs it just gets repetitive and annoying

the different skulls are nice and the capability to evolve them is really cool, but in 20 hours i only managed to evolve a skull to it's max potential once

the game have a variety of itens each one with especial buffs that stack for each other item with the same buff, BUT YOU CAN'T SEE YOUR STATS

the story is fine, the boss fights epic, but the general atmosphere is boring, i don't get an incentive to interact with the characters so i always forget my prime objective because i don't care about it, because the game doesn't get me to care

skul is the perfect half score game, it does so many things nice, but so many things wrong at the same time

Não consegui continuar jogando Skul, não achei ele divertido, pois ele é bem limitado no combate base do seu personagem, não tornando as primeiras Runs engajantes. Quanto aos updates e diferentes caveiras... apesar de algumas delas serem interessantes de fato, não acho que foram bem desenvolvidas a ponto de eu me importar com as caveiras outro fator que queria mencionar são os inimigos... eles simplesmente não valem a pena sair espancando porque eles não são desafiadores, mesmos alguns bosses são desinteressantes e as lutas demoram de mais de acontecer.
No futuro talvez eu possa jogar, mas por agora não gostei de como o jogo se apresentou.

A tale of two faces. Compared to the rest of the roguelike genre, this game may have the best presentation of any of them. The pixel art and soundtrack are both S-Tier. The variety of content in terms of the amount of skulls available made for above average run variety (at least for the player) and also I would say above average combat and game feel.

But dang, the run variety in terms of the levels is incredibly poor. Your essentially go through the exact same series of rooms and exact same boss fights on every single run. This game is incredibly poorly balanced, the regular enemies were all either insanely trivial or took massive chunks out of my health with no in between, and the bosses, specifically in world 2 and 3, were way too difficult.

The game’s meta progression also felt very empty and useless, it took too long and was way too expensive to get any permanent upgrades and yet they didn’t even feel very meaningful and there’s not that many of them. Also this game was pretty buggy and messy, I encountered several crashes and a lot of glitches.

Based on the positives this game makes a strong first impression but man the longer you play it the more you realize how flawed it is. I wish it would’ve lived up to its first impression and maintained its momentum for me

The game is "fun" up to a certain point, but soon after trying and inevitably failing after a few attempts, the game's biggest problem becomes evident. You have a very limited amount of permanent buffs that you purchase with purple crystals. Most of the skulls need to be upgraded throughout the run, and a large part of them doesn't reward the effort and luck of finding skull rooms to obtain bones. Even with strong skulls and a build focused on them, you still struggle in many parts of the journey...

I feel that when I manage to complete a run, it's due to luck, and I wonder when I'll be able to do it again. The good skulls appear very rarely, and the most frustrating thing is the mirror world. It's not just difficult but rather frustrating. Everything seems to rely on luck or something of the sort. The combat also isn't the best. Attacking and dodging, no matter how hard you try, doesn't become a dance like in other games.

But if you want to suffer a bit and spend a few hours trying to see skull variations and attempt to finish the game, it's an acceptable game on sale. I would never recommend buying it at full price.