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.