Indie Rock: Fancy Skulls

There are three Big Names in first person shooter roguelikes and two of them I don’t really care about. You want to play a game with permadeath seen through the eyes of the character you’re playing as? Your best options are Fancy Skulls, Heavy Bullets and Tower Of Guns.

But you should really just play Fancy Skulls.

It’s the least visually interesting of the bunch. It’s also the slowest and initially the least distinct. Perhaps that’s an unfair comparison against Tower Of Guns’ attempt to look like it’s drawn roughly and then implemented immediately, like the environments are ripped right from the workbook of a cool 11 year old. It’s over-designed and metallic, with textures that are half Rob Liefeld comic and half chunky machinery. It’s horrible. I love it.

Heavy Bullets and Fancy Skulls are both pretty visually limited, but the former’s set apart with brighter colours and a little bit more clutter. Fancy Skulls – for a little while – just seems empty. The world design is so sparse, with single colour rectangles for obstacles and there’s so little visual or kinesthetic feedback to your actions. The rooms are too big for the few set dressings and threats contained inside them. That limitation extends to some design-feel too; your weapon fires without jerking around. Enemies don’t really react to shots. The only way you know you’ve done damage is either hearing ammunition make contact or seeing the target fall apart.

But I like it the most because: it’s the weirdest. It’s so weird.

Tower Of Guns just feels like a shooter with some strange guns. You get guns and you shoot them at enemies. Yay. Heavy Bullets’ shtick is that your ammunition is limited but can be regained by killing the enemy it’s fired at and collecting it again. It informs a sense of push-and-pull with aiming carefully but needing to balance that with quickly moving threats.

Fancy Skulls has a bit of that. Ammo for your first weapon is unlimited, but you’re rated by certain criteria each time you clear a room of enemies. You’re attempting to do so without missing a shot, very quickly and without taking any damage. Doing well results in rewards that can help build your character in paths that are pretty wild. Initially it’s the least interesting of the bunch. It’s only a few rooms deep that the beautiful part is revealed.

Roguelikes are at their coolest when the player’s options for character progression is very limited. They need to gain more skills or items to progress but have no say in what’s handed to them. Because you’re forced into ways you can build your character you begin to pick upgrades that suit the build you’ve already begun creating.

Fancy Skulls has some strange options for character building. In one game I was able to get two upgrades for my revolver, one of them that would do more damage if the bullet fired was the last in the chamber, the other that would do splash damage to a nearby target if a shot missed. Here I am, after that, deliberately missing the final shot of my gun so that.

Knowing that this kind of build is possible has you second guessing the “good” choices that you can make. If you can power up the final shot in a magazine, why would you purchase an extension for it? That’s more shots between the start and the most effective bullet. You’d feel cheated by your past self for making you under-valuable in the future. I really like that!

I believe all three of these games are still in early access. Thankfully, Fancy Skulls seems like it needs the most work despite it having the best grounding. There’s a lot of time left for some tweaking in terms of Feel to make it more initially exciting to play, but it is already a killer time when you’re a little further in.