Analysis of Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona

Valkyrie Initiative is releasing a Souls game on XBOX with Metroidvania touches that will leave you in the dust and wanting more.

Ericona wakes up in a pile of corpses – herself included. He doesn’t know who he is, why he woke up, or why he can’t speak. He only knows that the world is rotten and hostile. That’s how it begins. Skelethrone: The Chronicles of EriconaIt’s not very original. The game that poses 70′ STRIKE Solo Developer (yes, it’s just one) take here and there and the result is something very recognizable and unsurprising but with little touches here and there that form a challenge worth taking.

I am a Souls man.

Our group of Telegram, especially “El Rincon de los Souls” is lucky with Skelethrone: The Chronicle of Ericona. Of course, it contains elements clearly taken from trendy RPGs. A system of souls and levels to increase vitality, strength, dexterity, resistance and spirit. These levels allow us to carry one type of weapon or another, always controlling the weight of the equipment. You can only level up by bonfires, that serve as teleports and reset defeated enemies. Sounds like something, right? There is one addition here: checkpoints between the bonfires in the shape of lanterns. If we die, we return to the lantern but the enemies do not resurrect, which greatly facilitates the recovery of souls after each death, but eliminates that feeling of constant danger in each fight due to the loss of loot.

The open field enemies are challenging and progress with us in each new area. There are difficulty spikes with some sealants that can become minibosses with a short fuse. These spikes as well as the real area bosses lead to the farming of already visited areas, which always breaks the rhythm of any game. The end-of-area bosses do not seek any balance nor do they expect any. That is the challenge: they do not have many moves and there are clear strategies for each attack, but What they do well is combine these attacks in every conceivable variation. Skelethrone: The Chronicle of Ericona It leaves with each death this bitter aftertaste that frustrates many but invites a few to step back, acknowledge their failures, die again, repeat and repeat and rise (often literally from their seats) victorious. That’s why I think he has more souls than anything else. gender. Well, that and another nod to the game’s saga of From Software.

Not very Metroidvania

It seems that if these non-linear adventures are in 2D, they must already be metroidvaniasand he is right. Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona It’s not linear, there’s a lot of backtracking and access to certain areas is blocked by a barrier that will open after obtaining a certain object or power, almost always eliminating a chief. Scattered across the map we can also find gemstones that are used for food. a skill tree that increases stats. This tree also upgrades one weapon type, forcing you to opt for a class. It’s a bit of a shock to have that and level up in the same game. They fit well together as they go in the same direction, but it seems like the developer couldn’t decide how to strengthen Ericona and decided to keep both. A strange decision, in my opinion. The map is large and with different settings, but Its design is quite vague. One area leads you to another and that leads you to another. It lacks more interconnections and shortcuts. The positions of the traffic lights seem random, either very close or very far away. Already on the screen we find flat and empty worlds. He platform is minimalfew areas with obstacles and also easy. This year we had several examples of the genre with good platforms and this is not one of them. Also, the logic between the different biomes no longer makes sense at some point, going down into a fungus-infested cave to continue down and find yourself… an open-air castle on a cliff? This can be forgiven with imagination, but the fact that some worlds don’t fit together with others doesn’t give much of a sense of unity. Yeah, It’s a metroidvania but one of the weakest of its kind.

The world of Ericona

Since we came into the world among the corpses, we see that the only thing the creatures want from us is to put us back in the pile from which we came. It’s supposed to be so explicit that It has a selector to remove very sensitive content. Towards the end of the game, I don’t see the point of this mode. Sure there is some gore and sensitive material, but no more than in all games of this theme. In fact, the direct example that comes to mind when you see art Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona It’s blasphemous and falls halfway. With a design that certainly has some moments of lucidity but in general it is not very innovative and flat.

The same thing happens with their NPCs, they have an interaction, and when you think it’s time to go back to town to talk, they don’t even offer you the opportunity to interact. The town itself is an example of this. It’s too long and empty for what the adventure is about.

Conclusions

There is little news Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona compared to other similar games. We know that its history and its worlds are not surprising. It is sometimes tedious to go through it. Even so Its combination of RPG levels with the Metroidvania skill system works very well together.. The amount of weapons and armor does not give the impression that the character can vary much during the adventure, but enough to face a fight that gets bogged down in a different way: a manual souls…with difficulty selector. His fans love the challenge and will find it here. What has been said: Die, analyze, come back, die and repeat until victory.