SKYHILL, an interesting and rather simplistic survival game on Linux

Today I had a chance to look at SKYHILL, an interesting looking 2D survival game about escaping from the top floor of a hotel. I was pretty excited by this, as it has a very positive rating on Steam.

Disclosure: Key provided by developer.

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You're trapped at the top of a once fancy hotel and someone decided to fire a nuke at your city. This leads to monsters, and a whole lot of them stand in your way to freedom. It's a really cool idea, and I applaud the developer for doing something a bit different. You move from room to room, and floor to floor searching for loot, people, monsters and so on. Moving rooms eats one bit of food, so keep stocked up.

It's all very much styled like a comic book, so as a geek who owns a few the visual style really appeals to me. It has an actual comic at the start to set the story up too, and if it had more of that spread through the game it would certainly make looting a bit more interesting. You can find cassette tapes though, which was great to find and hear some more properly voiced back-story.

The problem is that the combat becomes boring a bit too quickly, as the combat has zero skill involved whatsoever. Combat is essentially: Click on an enemy. The advanced option is to pick one of three body parts to hit. It's all then done for you, with no skill needed.

The gameplay really is the problem here as it's just too simple for me. Everything is literally click here, now click here, click a few more times and essentially that's all there is to it. You press the spacebar, and you can see exactly where you need to loot—click, done. There's not even any animations when you're looting, you just click and it pops into your inventory.

A great idea, really great, but in the end it becomes a bit too tedious for me. If the combat was more interesting I would have enjoyed it a lot more. It could be a good time killer, but not something I will personally want to go back to.

You can find SKYHILL on Steam.