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.

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

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

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

I think this period of alchemical noodling about in the mechanical limits of the various roguelite 'genres' (which, like, do we consider Skul more of a Spelunky-like or a Rogue Legacy-like or a Roguelite platformer or just an action platformer with roguelite elements? What is the bounding box on procedurally generated levels and perma-death?) is terribly interesting - an atomized collection of devs essentially doing a research project on a scale of a worldwide anarchic autopsy trying to figure out the points in which the skeletal infrastructure of 'necessary' genre conventions can be motivated by disparate, muscular coagulating play. It feels like with that tide, we're moving away from, "what if this genre, but roguelike?" to a more exciting, "what does roguelike framing do to these mechanics?" which is how you get from Slay the Spire to Monster Train to Griftlands - the first is basically a CCG with a loop that lasts 45 minutes and the last is a procedural RPG that does its storytelling through cardplay, contextualized by roguelike elements as minute character arcs, or really, build arcs. However, that grab bag approach loses something that the earlier Frankensteinian smash-this-into-perma-death approach kept closer to chest in its rigidity: the confirmation of mechanical solidity in its original form. Skul fails not due to its ambitions but to how it only loosely ties together the disparate collection its conglomerated under the roguelite horizon; the upgrade trees are weakly procedural and offer no tantalizing upgrade path but merely an assumption that play will hit par; the platforming is minimized because the world architecture needs to suffice for combat platforms as well as traversal, all generated and linked procedurally; the enemy behaviours are simple yet telegraphed inconsistently because the devs needed to make something that was encounterable yet dangerous to too many different Skull approaches; the tacked on "extra" sections are aided not at all by the pick up and play approach because the bite sized play sessions are then rendered inconsistent in what they are saying they deliver. Also, the writing and character design just kind of sucks.

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.

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.