The Skylia Prophecy – The review
The Skylia Prophecy, the pixel art that wanted to become Castlevania.
Present on PC for a little while now, the pixel art game from 7 Raven Studio is coming to Switch. Quite a good customer of this kind of game, I jumped straight into his test, on a copy kindly offered by the publisher.
First impressions: Very messy graphics.
I run the game, and after a very successful short intro, the scene opens with a lousy game. I am obviously aware that this type of graphics is an accepted choice, and that the game is meant to be pixel art, but here we are in the presence of fuzzy characters, whose features we can only roughly distinguish. The magic shield especially, creates such an aesthetic contract that it almost comes to shock the eye. We only see that. However, once the shock of the characters is overcome, the sets and the backdrop are much more polished, and come to make you forget the rest.
The soundtrack is cool, a bit repetitive of course, but that’s not a dealbreaker in a pixel art game. It offers the nostalgic side sought by the game.
Regarding the biggest flaws? First of all, the dungeons. Crossing a dungeon is interesting. But once it’s done, it’s very common to have to cross it back the other way to get out. Why ? Why impose to re-cross an EMPTY dungeon entirely, rather than teleport at the start like 95% of the games of the genre? The second big concern is exploration. Sometimes you have to switch to the top screen, but there’s no telling. So except jumping all over the place, it’s impossible to guess where to go upstairs.
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