Skyhill (PC)

Skyhill has been out since October 6th this year. At gamescom this past August, they released a trailer with the subtitle “Point‘n’Survive”, showing an interesting mashup of dark, post-apocalyptic survival game and point-and-click adventure. Keep reading to find out how it all comes together in the full game, and whether they’ve been able to pull off this mix of genres.

Explosive Change

As Perry Jason, a businessman exhausted from the day’s work, you’re looking out of the window of your luxury suite on the 100th floor of the Skyhill hotel when you witness a violent explosion. What exactly happened remains a mystery at first, and you spend the first few days after the explosion inside your hotel room. It soon becomes apparent, though, that you don’t have enough food to last forever, and that you’re going to have to leave the relative safety of your room if you want to survive. This is a lot harder than it sounds, though, as the way down to the ground floor is infested with aggressive mutants, and you’re in constant danger of starving.

On your way down, you’ll find information left behind by other people who were staying at the hotel, allowing you to gradually piece together what has happened. Unfortunately, these little snippets of information are so rare and unrelated to one another that they quickly fade into the background. While the stuff you find will remain in your journal even after you inevitably have to start over, there’s really no motivation to read through it all again.

Hotel Survival Strategies

Each of the hotel’s 100 floors are laid out the same way: staircase and elevator in the middle, with one room to the right and one room to the left. The exact appearance and arrangement of each room, however, is randomly generated with each new playthrough, and the rooms are filled with different items to be found and creatures waiting to attack you. This, combined with the ability to choose an active and a passive perk at the beginning of each attempt, ensures that each time will be a new experience. The various perks need to be unlocked one by one, however, depending on what happened in earlier playthroughs, encouraging you to experiment with different combinations. And you’ll have lots of opportunities too, as Skyhill makes survival anything but easy, even at the lowest difficulty setting.

You start with full health and 50 out of 100 hunger points. Hunger points are tied to movement: each time you move to a different room it costs one hunger point. Once you’ve used them all up, you start losing health every time you move. To save hunger points, you can use the elevator – provided, of course, you’ve figured out how to get it working and found the right access card. Health and hunger are replenished by searching the hotel rooms for medicine and food. But be careful here – not everything is still edible, and you can end up getting sick or poisoned by eating the wrong stuff. When supplies get really short, you’re going to have to weigh each risk carefully, as rushing right ahead and taking chances is usually a good way to meet a quick death.

Ever scarcer resources and increasingly powerful enemies make it essential to use Skyhill’s crafting system, which allows you to combine items to create better weapons, food, and bandages, and it also lets you upgrade your penthouse on the 100th floor. This can expand your crafting options or, for example, equip your bed to regenerate health as the cost of hunger points. The system itself, like the game’s entire interface, is kept pretty simple, focusing only on the essentials. The whole thing’s very easy to figure out, allowing you to concentrate on surviving.

You can find all this information in the tutorial, which you always have the option of running at the beginning of each playthrough, regardless of difficulty level. This makes it easier to get back into the game when you haven’t played it in a while.

Fighting with the Mouse

Once you understand the basics, you can begin exploring the hotel. As the whole “point’n’surive” thing indicates, this is done exclusively with the mouse. Click on a room, and Perry goes there. Click an item, and it goes in your inventory, where you can click it again to use it. It won’t be long before you run into your first enemies, and you’ll notice that combat, too, is point-and-click and turn-based.

Once you click on your opponent, you’ll be given three attack options. These options vary in terms of possible damage dealt and chance of hitting the target. The basic principle is “the less likely you are to land a hit, the more damage it will cause”, which is simple and easy to understand, even for new players, but not without its issues. Since everything is left to chance, you can miss several times in a row, even at 80%. This can get really frustrating, especially if the encounter in question leads to your death and you have to start from the beginning – the game’s a rogue-like, after all.

An Interactive Post-Apocalyptic Comic

The interesting comic-book style of the graphics in Skyhill was another thing that caught people’s eye at gamescom this summer. Unlike most game today, the intro is not a cut scene, but a comic-book sequence that tells the story of how Perry Jason got to where he is. Like most point-and-click adventures, the game is 2D, and apart from movement animations it mostly dispenses with any real effects to speak of. One notable exception is the animation outside the hotel, where dark clouds and stormy weather contribute to a foreboding and gloomy atmosphere.

Sound

The soundtrack consists of only one track on a loop, but it doesn’t really get annoying, either. It actually serves to underscore the atmosphere, and its dark and heavy nature ensure that it remains in the background. As of this time Skyhill is only available with full audio in English and Russian, but it does feature interface and subtitle options for nine other languages, including German, Spanish, French, Polish, and more. The English-language voiceovers fit into the game’s overall sound design, but they don’t read out the texts you find in the game.