[Review] The Skylia Prophecy - Nintendo Switch

Developer: Ezekiel Rage, 7 Raven Studios
Publisher: 7 Raven Studios
Categories: Action, Retro
Release Date: 04.24.21

The Skylia Prophecy is the kind of game that makes me sad. Really sad. I like this game quite a bit, but the feeling of it not having proper playtesting, or an unfinished feel seems to be in the entire game.

Lets get what I like out of the way first. The spritework and character designs are gorgeous. There’s great animation, and lots of enemy variety. There’s lots of places to go too, plenty of towns to talk to people in, shops to buy items in, and side quests to make more money. The game also rewards you for going out of your way to find hidden paths or dungeons to give you health, attack, or mana upgrades. If you can’t find any of those, you can always kill enough enemies to level up. This way seems a tad more random than I’d like, as you’re never told how and when you level up, it just happens. The music is quite catchy too, the game knows how to build a mood.

The plot of The Skylia Prophecy had me intrigued too. Our lead Mirenia unleashed a terrible evil years ago, with the game having you near the end of her journey to fix what he did, more mature and ready. I love redemption stories, especially if it’s the playable lead.

Now to what I don’t like. While the spritework is good, the character art and art for game over screens, the title screen, intro all seems way too low of a resolution. The art looks good, but it doesn’t look clear. The game also seems to be unfairly difficult at times. The game has a checkpoint system, which heals your HP and mana, and that seems fair. But the checkpoints also hard save, meaning you can potentially get stuck in an area you’re not prepared for. The bosses, while often cool looking are not fun and are hit sponges. One boss for instance takes over two dozen hits, and can kill you in two, three if you have a healing potion. This isn’t fun, it’s frustrating and drags, it does give a great feel of satisfaction if you get through at least. Enemies in this game in general can hit HARD. It’s just a tad too punishing at times when the only ways to heal are checkpoints, the SINGLE (as in you hold one at a time) potion, and a random level up.

While attacking works fine, blocking can seem a bit picky. Perhaps it it’s just me, but when you need to use your shield to have bombs explode to destroy a wall, I could never quite gauge how close I had to be. This can most definitely lead to a quick death, which is incredibly frustrating. I’d suggest making the shield go out just a *tiny* bit further, just to get around this issue.

Lets discuss the shop. You can buy one of each of any item in the shop. Healing potions, mana, invincibility, etc…You can also buy keys, which you’ll need to get into doors, dungeons, boss fights. If you don’t have these, you can get them from this catgirl, but that’s often not worth it as without spoiling, it’ll bite you in the butt. I like that you can buy all of this, but the fact you could potentially have no money and need to go to that alternate path, which punishes you for a variety of reasons including multiple point of no returns kinda sucks.

The Skylia Prophecy feels like it needed more time in the oven. It has the core of a great game and the developer shows he has passion, but things always feel off. I’ll be keeping my eye on this game for future updates, since I really do want to like it more.