The Skylia Prophecy

The Skylia Prophecy was reviewed on a PS4

First impressions are important, more so in gaming than in any other medium. The Skylia Prophecy’s first impressions are a perfect indicator of what’s to expect during your playthrough of this short 16-bit action adventure game.

The Skylia Prophecy’s issues begin to pop up as soon as you boot it up. It presents you with two walls of texts that explains a bit of lore. Unfortunately, unless you’re the quickest reader in the world, you won’t be able to read all of it. The wall moves way too quickly and the game skips them by itself without waiting for any button input from the player.

This might seem like a minor inconvenience, but its issues don’t stop there.

What is The Skylia Prophecy?

The Skylia Prophecy is a 2D Side-scrolling platformer that puts you in the shoes of a blade-wielding teenager called Mirenia, whose sole purpose in life is to rid the land of the demons and ghouls that roam it. The game is set in a medieval fantasy world and its visuals borrow heavily from games like Castlevania and Ghosts ‘n Goblins. You start each level by visiting a town, talking to the locals and venturing out into a dungeon area filled with dangerous enemies before reaching yet another town.

The first enemy encounter in the game is a crawling bug, but there’s no crouching attack. You have to hold the block key, which makes Mirenia hold up some sort of a force field as a shield, and wait for the bug to approach the shield and die a swift death. A few minutes later, the game tells you to use the shield to detonate a barrel full of explosives, but stand too close to it, and you’ll die in the blast. There’s no indicator whatsoever to let you know if you’re in the blast radius or not, so you end up retrying a few times to get it right. Note that at this point, you’re still in the “tutorial” section of the game.

Frustratingly Difficult

The lack of a crouch attack is one of the many design choices that purposefully makes the game unnecessarily convoluted. Another unfortunate design choice is the way the game handles backtracking and saving. It always seems as if the cards are stacked against you in The Skylia Prophecy. It doesn’t always allow you to backtrack into previous areas, and you can only save the game at specific locations. This might not seem like a major issue, but it truly is one when it’s paired with some of the other issues of the game.

You can use potions that you buy at the game’s shops to refill your health and mana, but you can only buy one potion of each type at a time. You also have to buy a key that unlocks the several locked doors you’ll encounter during your adventures. Since you can’t backtrack, you’ll have to make do with one health and one mana refill. This problem is made worse with the game’s lack of checkpoints. Losing your health and dying means you’ll be presented with the Game Over screen before being brought back to the menu screen so you can load up your game once again.

Insanity is going through the same dungeons over and over again

Loading the game brings you back to your last save point, which are often located near the game’s towns that serve as hub areas. This means that a large part of your time during the game is spent revisiting and memorizing the same drab and dreaded locations, and the same enemy placements. Instead of relying on creating an actual sense of difficulty, the game keeps throwing at you the deliberately frustrating design choices that only serve to punish the player.

The only good aspect of The Skylia Prophecy is its tight controls. If only these controls were implemented in a game that actually made good use of them.

Overall,

You only need a few minutes of playtime to realize that The Skylia Prophecy is inherently, a bad game. Its insistence on making the player’s life a living hell with its obtuse restrictions is very disappointing.

Unless you’re an absolute masochist and a glutton for punishment, I recommend that you steer clear from this one. Besides its decent controls, The Skylia Prophecy offers nothing of value.

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Special thanks go to 7 Raven Studios for providing us with a review code.

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You should play The Skylia Prophecy if you

• Don’t mind the unfair difficulty
• Don’t mind the forgettable story
• Love a 2D Sidescroller
• Don’t mind the bland and repetitive locations

The Skylia Prophecy Score

2/10