Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Review [Switch] | Dark, Dead, and Disturbing｜Game8 (2024)

Skelethrone: the Chronicles of Ericona is a metroidvania and souls-like hybrid where you play as an undead. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Review Overview

What is Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona?

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona’s main gameplay feature is its Metroidvania-style action platforming, which is supplemented by an equipment and armory system straight out of a Soulslike. You wake up as a nameless undead who has retained their intelligence. You set out in order to explore the region, meeting questionably open-minded individuals who reach out their hands to you as you slowly uncover why the world has sunk into its monster-infested state.

In addition to standard mob monsters, this game also features challenging boss fights, non-linear progression, and countless unlocks to expand your platforming and combat options.

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona features:
　⚫︎　Souls-like core gameplay
　⚫︎　Metroidvania platforming
　⚫︎　Different weapon types, including ranged options
　⚫︎　Level-up by increasing specific stats
　⚫︎　A specialization skill tree
　⚫︎　Big boss fights
　⚫︎　Narrative-driven progression

For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona's gameplay and story.

Steam	$14.99
PlayStation Store	$14.99
Nintendo eShop	$14.99

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Pros & Cons

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Overall Score - 70/100

Skelethrone is a decent game if you want to play something with a unique difficulty level. Its boss fights are relatively easy unlike most souls-like games, but the mob fights are clearly harder due to its mechanics. It also has major platforming sections that contrast heavily with its very grounded combat. Otherwise, the game is far easier than most souls-like/metroidvania hybrid, so it’s a good place to start if you’re new to the genre.

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Story - 7/10

Similar to its visual style, Skelethrone’s story is dark and gritty, yet somehow maintaining a tone of ridiculousness that adds a bit of depth. The narrative style is simple and easy to follow, and the plot goes a long way into fleshing out the game’s torn-down world. Despite that, you won’t feel as if the story is progressing much during your playthrough due to its sparse interaction with your exploration. It essentially takes the farthest backseat to put its gameplay front and center.

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Gameplay - 8/10

Featuring a strange mix of metroidvania elements on a souls-like foundation, Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona is an experience of fun and frustration in relatively equal measure. Sure, the mechanical difficulty that marks it as a souls-like is there, but it’s placed in strange, not necessarily wrong places. For example, the boss fights themselves are easy, but combat against normal mobs typically isn’t. On top of all that, for some reason, despite having metroidvania platforming segments, the developers decided to add fall damage into the mix.

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Visuals - 7/10

The sprite work that went into the game gives me mixed feelings. On the one hand, they’re very pretty (gruesome) and the level designs look sick as hell. But at the same time, it doesn’t look like much effort was done in order to animate them nicely. There are even some very weird movements that look utterly baffling, such as overhead attacks being underhand swings.

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Audio - 6/10

While Skelethrone comes with all of the usual action title bells and whistles, namely background tracks and sound effects, none of them are particularly good at what they do. Sword swipes always sound like they’re cutting through cotton rather than tearing through flesh. The background music is also pretty forgettable, despite not being drowned out by all the action.

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Value for Money - 7/10

Skelethrone’s selling price is quite cheap at a cent short of $15.00. Even with all of its caveats, that’s still a pretty good deal. There are a lot of things to experiment on such as builds, fighting styles, and stat investments. Exploration is also decently rewarding due to the scant items scattered here and there.

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Review: Dark, Dead, and Disturbing

I’m quite into edgy things. For example, Black Rock Shooter is my favorite media series, and Punishing Gray Raven is my favorite mobile game. Hence, Skelethrone’s aesthetics made it quite an appealing title for an edgelord such as myself; the perfect game for a weekday session of procrastination.

It starts off well enough. The camera panning across war-torn wastelands is effective in setting the tone for what would be a multi-hour escapade into crypts, caves, swamps, and all of those things you would typically relate to a dark medieval game. Getting to play as a skeleton with glowing green flames for eyes is also your everyday edgelord’s dream come true.

It’s good impressions didn’t last long, though, as I immediately noticed a glaring issue.

Where the heck are the sound effects coming from? It feels like they’re detached from the combat itself. What that means is that the feedback from attacks feels like an overlaid effect rather than a result of your actions.

Stamina usage also heavily weighs down a dodge-centric playstyle such that you’ll be gasping for air after just a couple of combat rolls. This is especially noticeable early on in the game while you’re lacking in stat investments to increase your stamina bar.

Well, on the other hand, attacks use so little stamina that you can easily spam them.

You also have access to skills that don’t use stamina at all. Instead, they have cooldowns attached to them, making skill spam impossible for all but the most patient person on Earth.

It’s not like you’re required to take conventional approaches in battle, anyway. Since you have tools like double jumps, you can use the vertical dimension almost as much as you can use the horizontal ones. This is a great alternative to dodging via combat rolls so you don’t quickly run out of breath and start panting like dogs.

It’s just too bad that bosses in general are pretty easy to beat. I’ve admittedly had far more trouble fighting against mobs than bosses in Skelethrone, mainly because mobs can detect you from a large distance and they can clip into each other. This results in relatively common cases where you’ll have to fight three or more enemies at once.

And forget about trying to stunlock them with attacks. They’ll get an attack off regardless of what you do.

Meanwhile, bosses are extremely predictable and attack very infrequently, giving you a lot of time to spam attacks like a reckless Dual Blade user in Monster Hunter. If anything, you’ll have far more trouble with the platforming sections than boss fights.

Speaking of platforming sections, Skelethrone has plenty of those. And oh boy are they a joy (sarcasm). It works like any typical platformer title; jump on floating platforms or pillars, avoid hazards, cling and jump off walls, etc. However, there’s one caveat that I think deserves a lot of attention:

Why the heck is there fall damage?

Yes, I know fall damage is normal in souls-likes. Nobody wants players to abuse platforms to harass certain enemies, after all. But in a game like Skelethrone where the platforming sections can reach heights that are typically only ventured in proper metroidvanias, a fall from a decent enough height can kill you regardless of the existence or lack thereof of a pitfall below. In fact, pitfalls in these areas are often completely redundant since you’ll die once a pixel of your feet touch the floor, anyway.

This "feature" makes platforming sections feel more like a punishment rather than a fun session of exploring possibilities.

God help you if there’s terrain hazards involved because those things will send you back and can easily kill you from the resulting fall.

So, is Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona a good game? Well, it’s easy enough, that’s for sure. But its challenges are in places that are counterintuitive for those used to the two genres, which might throw you off.

But overall, it’s quite decent. It’s also cheap, so you can always just get it when you have some spare change. The visuals are pretty damn good, and the worldbuilding is relatively deep.

Just don’t expect to die a lot from bosses. That’s a role for the platforming and exploration sections.

Pros of Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona

Compact But Open Maps

Considering the movement tools and pacing metroidvania games usually provide, their maps are often large, sprawling, and sometimes empty. After all, it’s better than being able to travel from one end to the other within the span of five seconds. But since Skelethrone only really inherited the tools and not the pace of metroidvanias, the maps are compacted in an effort to not force you to take half a day to explore a quarter of it.

This makes exploring quite easy as long as you remember to check your map every so often… and if you don’t fall down pits every seven seconds.

Lenient Enemy Respawn Mechanics

Just like resting at a bonfire, when you die in a souls-like (which is often), the game tends to welcome you back with a map refilled with the enemies you’ve previously painstakingly escorted to the afterlife. This makes progress in souls-likes more of a slow crawl towards the goal through gradual improvement rather than a leisurely stroll through the woods.

Unless you just run straight through them, of course. The "can’t be bothered" strat does work wonders.

But in Skelethrone, dying doesn’t make enemies respawn. In other words, you can run through the areas you’ve previously explored to claim your lost loot and try again, but with full health and a pack full of potions... well, except if this is a bug.

Dynamic Environment

Similar to particularly sad*stic platformers, Skelethrone’s maps aren’t just meant to serve as a pretty wrapper for the game’s cardboard box collision boxes. It’s riddled with environmental hazards, breakable containers, moving or disappearing platforms, etc. In a way, you interact with the environment more than you do your enemies, so this level of variety really makes exploration segments much more immersive than your typical souls-like, 2D or otherwise.

The Puppy Is cute

Who's a good boy?

Cons of Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona

Platforming Is A Mixed Bag

Adding metroidvania elements to a souls-like (or vice versa) isn’t something new. Many games have already experimented with the concept to varying success. Skelethrone’s take on the mix, unfortunately, is pretty annoying.

The major issue stems from the existence of fall damage on a game that regularly has you platform your way up to very dangerous heights. It almost makes the pitfalls that sometimes exist at the bottom redundant. You’re gonna die when you fall all the way down, anyway.

Unsatisfactory Combat Feedback

Any action game should assert their gameplay through visual or audio feedback. It’s what gives you the feeling that you’re making progress in your fight. This is especially true for mob fights since they lack any health bars to indicate if you’re actually doing any real damage.

Usually, this is done by making enemies recoil when hit or giving a crunchy sound effect that kind of emulates how your weapon digs into whatever it hits. Skelethrone does have those things. But, they’re not at a level that’s pleasing to any action enthusiast. The visual recoil barely differs from an enemy’s default standing pose, and weapon hits sound like they’re tearing through cotton bedsheets.

If you combine that with an unruly mob of 3-4 monsters strong, it becomes difficult to gauge if you should dodge out of the way immediately after attacking, or if you can keep up the pressure with your attacks.

Various Performance Problems

I have become one with the pit. They have accepted me as part of their own.

During my time playing Skelethrone, I’ve encountered a handful of bugs that, at the very least, managed to raise my eyebrows. These range from relatively harmless things such as visual elements like entire ladders sometimes disappearing (who would even steal a ladder nowadays) to actual game-breaking ones.

The latter are fortunately extremely rare and require specific conditions that I haven’t been able to replicate more than twice. For example, the game won’t register your death if you fall into a pit right after getting hit by an enemy sometimes. That requires a reset.

Lag is sometimes an issue as well, which is strange considering how undemanding the game looks like. This is especially a very real problem when you’re above ground where very noticeable frame drops can occur as you explore the map.

Is Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Worth It?

It’s a relatively easy game to get into

While Skelethrone does suffer from its weird platforming mechanics and bafflingly challenging mob fights, it’s still a decent enough game to consider when you’re looking for a souls-like/metroidvania hybrid to play. It has very pretty visuals, and the character investment options allow for a variety of builds. Otherwise, everything else is just weighed down by minor issues.

Platform	Price
Steam	$14.99
PlayStation Store	$14.99
Nintendo eShop	$14.99

Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona FAQ

Does Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona have multiplayer?

No, Skelethrone is a single-player game.

How many weapons are there in Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona?

There are a variety of weapons to collect in the game, which range from daggers, swords, maces, bows, etc. Each of them uses a different stat that influences your proficiency, so misplacing stat points become a very real issue later on.

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Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona Product Information

Title	SKELETHRONE : THE CHRONICLES OF ERICONA
Release Date	August 7, 2024
Developer	70’ Strike
Publisher	Valkyrie Initiative
Supported Platforms	PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Genre	Action, Platformer
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	PEGI 16
Official Website	N/A