Skyhill - a challenging little game of luck and gamble

You're a hotshot who just had a business in the city and are now looking for a place to wind up at. The planet is having a rough time at the moment, and word has it that the next world war is very likely at your frontdoor. But you're lucky enough to get yourself into an expensive suite at the top floor of one prestigious hotel, when out of nowhere, the city is hit by a bio-weapon and the impact turns everyone who's unlucky enough to be unprotected into mutants. Your wife is somewhere in the city, and what stands between you and her are 99 floors full of mutants and lunatics lurking in almost every corner.

Skyhill is a survival horror at heart as much as it is an RPG. Crafting plays an extremely vital role in the game, and as a matter of fact, is much more complex than the very straightforward experience mechanics. You start from the VIP suite on the 100th floor, which is also your homebase that can be upgraded it multiple ways. Your main objective is to get to the ground floor. Most of your crafting work has to be done in the VIP suite, so you will have to go back and forth between the suite and the floors down below. Now here is the fun part: each time you get from one floor or one room to another, you lose one point from your hunger bar. When your hunger bar reaches zero, you will start to lose health points. Zero health point means game over. The more you travel, the closer you get to total starvation, hence the closer you are to dying. But you have to travel and search rooms for food and items that will help you survive and get to the ground floor in one piece.

Your comfort zone.

Lucky for you, you can travel multiple floors with ease because people are smart enough to build elevators in buildings, especially in ones that have 100 floors. Unlucky for you, the elevator system in this particular building is broken. Each broken elevator; which is usually 5 to 10 floors apart from each other; cuts off your elevator access to the floors below. And if you proceed to go deeper down while ignoring the broken elevator and leaving it unfixed, you won't be able to use all the elevators in the floors below it to get back to the VIP suite (unless you want to walk all the way up and starve to death, which is always a choice). Each elevator requires a specific item to get it fixed. If the required item is absent from your inventory, you can still try fixing the elevator, but this will consume quite a shitload of points from the hunger bar. To make it worse, there's a chance that you might lose an item, and worst of all, there is always the chance of failing.

Crafting is the heart of the game, and it's surprisingly complex for a game with a gameplay scale as low as this. As you travel from one floor to another, you will have the chance to explore the rooms for items such as food, medicine and crafting materials, which you can combine to craft weapons and other more sophisticated items. And you will most definitely need to craft weapons; the more dangerous the weapon, the higher is your chance to survive the multiple encounters you'll have with your hostile companies. There is also the need to "craft" food. While you can still consume the basic food items you find, they usually give lower boost as compared to the more proper meals that you can prepare by combining multiple food items. This where the gamble steps in. Eat now, or should you save it until you find another food item that will give way to a better meal?

You have to make smart decisions when crafting. Consider what's good for both the short and long terms.

Starvation might not be a direct enemy, but it has as high the chance to shut you out of the game as do the mutants and lunatics that patiently await in the floors below. Combat is turn-based and very direct. You get to choose one of three body parts to attack, and each part has different hit chances and damages. The more damage that can be done, the less chances you have to hit that part. Your enemy might miss as well, especially if you have higher chance to dodge but it's better to not rely on that, because when they hit, they hit hard especially the mutants. And not to mention that your inventory is inaccessible during combat, hence taking out the possibility to heal in the middle of battle. Then there are the lunatics: humans who have lost their sanity due to the disaster, and you will most definitely encounter them every so often. They might be less monstrous, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous, especially during the early stages. Worse, they're tricky too. You are more likely than not to have them taking potshots at you and running away before you even have the chance to smoke these assholes.

Since your inventory is inaccessible during battle, there is always a chance for things to get out of hand. And if they do, as they likely are, you have the option to retreat from battle, but with one penalty: the enemy gets to hit you one last time. So if you have like 2 health points left and the enemy does 5 damage, you're basically dead already. However, if you get into a room, stumble upon an enemy, and choose not engage, there is a high chance that you can get away without being harmed, as long as the battle has not been initiated yet.

I can hit his dick from down here but unfortunately he has traded it for high hitpoints.

As you can expect, stronger enemies grant higher experience points. Sometimes, when luck is on your side, and if you have a good weapon in hand, it is possible to mow down a strong mutant with say, 50 health points, whilst taking extremely minimal damage. So, although battles are all straightforward, the decision whether to engage into one or not is a little less so. The game also tries to be more "realistic" and creative when it comes to the mutants. Now and then you'll stumble upon some mutants with different appearances but are just the same types as the ones you've encountered before. So, it's kind of nice to see a mutant dressed in a security guard suit and encounter another that's dressed in a maintenance worker attire, since it makes you feel like, "Ah, these used to be two different people infected by the same virus", or something along that line. Boy, I'm getting worse when it comes to describing stuff these days, even something as trivial as this needs an elaborate explanation. Maybe I should start writing more frequently next time, but oh well, you get my point.

Anyway, I think I should mention that Skyhill takes a page out of Don't Starve's book. No save game and no multiple lives. Once your health bar is absent of healthpoints, that's the end of it. You have to start over from square one, regardless of how far you have got to. Yes, it is unforgiving. But look at the bright side, you get to unlock perks! Provided that the game is over after you have reached lower floors than your previous playthrough. The lower you get to, the more perks you get to unlock.

We hope you enjoyed your stay, sir. Please come again.
If you have the balls to.

Unfortunately, some perks don't work as they should. For example, the Addict perk; supposedly, it gives you the immunity to poison and makes rotten food edible without penalty. So, as you can guess, I chose the perk for one of my playthroughs because I knew some time later on, one of those fat toxic mutant bastards is going to vomit poisonous slime all over my face. Having some hideous mutant throwing up in your face is already bad enough, you won't want to get poisoned as well. Besides, food is vital in this game and you are likely to face the situation in which you need to eat rotten food. A few floors down, I found one rotten banana. Ate it, and what do you know, I was alright and from that point, I would always be happy to find rotten food as much as I would normal food. But then, as I said, the perk doesn't work as intended by the game. As predicted, I finally got toe to toe with one of those venomous mutants and I got poisoned, despite the perk!

This brings us to another problem: the game is not clear on some things. Getting poisoned is a big deal. Now you will have to lose 1 health point everytime you get from one room to another. Worst of all, there seems to be no way to stop its effect, until you actually find it out (hint: medic tab). See, that's yet another problem. The same thing goes with some of the perks. For a game this simple and technically limited when it comes to having more complex gameplay mechanics, it should be more straightforward and the learning curve should be a bit less steep. Discovering that the poisoned effect sticks around for the rest of the game after you've invested shit loads of time into one playthrough isn't something that is too pleasant to experience.

But screw all these tiny problems. They are too trivial for such a tense game.

At least I'm not poisoned. Yet.

All in all, given that the game already throws you into a stressful situation from the get-go (it is meant to be a stressful game anyway), these problems don't bring anything new to the table, at least not much because you'll be constantly pressured all the time. This game revolves around making smart decisions, and then leaving everything else to the throw of a dice. Each room is a gamble. Do they worth searching? What if there's nothing there at all? What if there's a mutant waiting inside? Is it really necessary to engage? And every battle is like the toss of a dice, too. Do I really want experience points? There are chances that the mutants might drop something once they're dead. That is, if they fall first. Then when it comes to food, it's an entirely different gamble. Should I eat this bread, or should I wait til I find some butter to make a butter sandwich with for a higher boost? What if I go to sleep before I get to find the butter, and somebody steals the only bread that I have?

Plan carefully, and then throw your dice. This little game is a game of luck and gamble, and that's exactly where the challenge comes from. This is also what makes it such an interesting and addictive game. That said, Skyhill isn't for everyone, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game. It just needs to hit the right player. And if you feel like you're up for the challenge, then I wholeheartedly recommend this little gem. Then, we'll see if you're masochistic enough to pay multiple visits to the hotel after you fail your first attempt to escape.

But if you do manage to reach the ground on your first attempt, you're probably one of the luckiest and smartest bastards around.