How hard is this game?

[Crack Open a Cold One]

How hard is it compared to Hades or Streets of Rogue?

[Magico Shion]

I haven't played any of them, but personally I don't think the game is hard at all.

It does have a bit of metaprogression but it's very straight forward and all of the buffs you can buy are online all at once.

As far as difficulty goes.

As long an Enemy doesn't have a sudden yellow outline before attacking, or, it's just a one of the big guys or a boss, the enemy can be stunned simply by attacking them.

In Floor 1 is exactly 1 Enemy that has this ability, Floor 2 it's 3 or 4.

Floor 3 doesn't have that many that enemies that cannot be stunned by attacking, rather, they have a lot that don't even flinch while attacking, and a lot of them explode upon death.

Floor 4 is where the difficulty actually starts to get worse.

Almost every enemy either cannot be interrupted at all or has the ability of the yellow outline, meaning you can stun them via attacks until they use a certain attack.

In addition, the enemies in Floor 4 all have lots of health, it shouldn't be much a problem tough considereing you are already this far into the game.

However Floor 4 enemies also introduce divine magic that build up stacks upon getting hit, dealing more and more physical damage to you if you get hit. (This can be removed via cleansing)

Floor 4 is where it's at in terms of difficulty, but even then it's not the end of the world.




The game is very easy to master as every single enemy including bosses have very specific stances before proceeding with a certain attack. If you can memorize them you are already in a good position to flawless most enemies and bosses with ease.

You also still have your dodge that gives you i-frames.

The most difficult part about the game is if you have no meta progresson unlocked yet and if you haven't seen the enemy yet, if you do, it becomes very fast second nature to get rid of them.

[ZexxCrine]

as I say to all of these posts with a person imediatly being like "lol game easy" take it with a grain of salt. about every day we get topics like "x is too hard X needs to be tonned down" "I can never beat X" "x is unfair" and we have people with 40+ hour in the game that havent beaten it.

this is pretty normal with rougelikes because once you understand absolutely everything about the game, playing the game to win it becomes easy to do. the rate at which players learn, retain, and piece together this information varies greatly.

[Rubyeyed]

The real difficluty in Skul comes from screen clutter (enemies and attacks overlapping) in many rooms. Other titles like for example Hades are far cleaner and for 99% of the time you know what is happening. Here it's more about crowd control with staggers and abilities because it's safer that way if you can't see what's exactly happening.

btw devs said in a news post that they will try to "fix" this clutter issue

Mechanics and content wise it is not hard because the game is rather simple in nature. Enemy patterns aren't outrageous, I got to the end around like 30th attempt I think so it's not that bad. Bosses have a lot of tells so dodging is not that difficult if you are paying attention + you get i-frames on dodge.

[MoonBeech]

Having played Hades and seen Streets of Rogue played, I would definitely say Skul is harder. It is mostly due to the fact that both of those games had a looong development time and/or massive audience feedback (because SuperGiant), and Skul is much fresher off the presses and less balanced overall.

Over time, as the devs continue making balance passes and adding content, I could see SoR and Skul being about the same at base difficulty (though you die in a much more sudden way in Rogue) and maybe about 5-10 heat Hades being about on par with Skul. That's just my take.

[Donoghu]

I wouldn't say that the difficulty is similar to Hades. I would say that the game is really close to a game like Dead Cells with its randomized weapons/skills with a tiny bit of Rogue Legacy with its focus on dying to become stronger. It also has an inventory system similar to Risk of Rain where items you pick up have some sort of synergy.

Due to the random nature of the game, inventory-wise, the difficulty is more oriented on luck and sacrifices than in Hades.

There's one especially different thing about this game vs Hades or Streets of Rogue and that's layout. Hades & Streets of Rogue are isometric 2D action game while this is a 2D sidescroller game. Movements and the concept of how the attacks works is different.

[Get Singed]

This is really hard to say. When I first started the game I couldn't even imagine beating the first boss, it seemed nearly impossible, and now I'm at the point where I can't even remember the last time I died before the final area. It's like any roguelike or roguelite really, it's difficult until you've learned what you need to learn, then the fighting becomes second nature. The difficulty in Skul is more about your decision making when choosing which doors to enter or which items to take to try to pursue a build, and maybe about learning how the different skulls play. Mechanically, it's basically no different than Dead Cells aside from different skulls having slightly different movement. It's not like you need to be a god at button pressing or precise timing, you just need to learn the enemies.

[BillHicks]

About has hard as a two cell run in Dead Cells.

[Zelakon]

Originally posted by Rubyeyed:

The real difficulty in Skul comes from screen clutter (enemies and attacks overlapping) in many rooms. Other titles like for example Hades are far cleaner and for 99% of the time you know what is happening. Here it's more about crowd control with staggers and abilities because it's safer that way if you can't see what's exactly happening.

This is the game's main problem and reason why it's simply not as good as other roguelite titles like Hades and Dead Cells. The lack of clarity in seeing exactly when to dodge from enemies overlapping (particularly if you're running a physical melee build) makes the game much harder than it should be for the players who gravitate to that sort of playing style, as well as adding yet another reason why magical AoE builds are broken by comparison.

[Zouls]

A massive issue with the games difficulty is that the upgrading between runs is so brokenly overpowered. You can get literal one time revives, shields when switching characters, flat massive increases to damages and crit chance. ridiculous reduced cooldown of skulls, etc etc. Someone mentioned it was a thing they were aware off. But yesterday i got to the very last boss with a super cheese build despite having almost no upgrades, and then i died at the second phase, but since i didnt have the "you revive once for x hp" upgrade, which would have let me win the fight, i lost. would it be possible to win without having it? maybe. But i went in with full HP and lost 95% of it due to a move that covered the entire screen in flames with seemingly no way to avoid it.

So take it with a grain of salt, the moves of bosses CAN be avoided, the attacks of enemies CAN be avoided. however like most other games its a matter of how skilled you are offset with how stupid your combination is.

https://gyazo.com/ab877aaae755a06a34d97c64cc57bf17 here was my build with the basic skull and tons of items where i pretty much just "ignored" all the boss mechanics.