I recently got a chance to play around an hour of Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona on the PlayStation 5 Pro, thanks to a review copy provided by Valkyrie Initiative.
You can find my gameplay video, as well as my written impressions of the game so far, below:
Pros:
- Gothic-style pixel art.
- Multiple difficulty settings.
Cons:
- Can’t change difficulty mid game.
Overall:
Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona is a 2D Soulslike. Like other similar games, you gain experience by defeating enemies. If you die, then you will drop your experience. If you die again without picking up the experience you dropped, then they will be lost forever.
To spend your experience, you need to look for campfires. For there, you can upgrade various stats, some of which are important to unlock the potential of your equipment.
Interacting with a campfire will also respawn all of the enemies you defeated. The enemies, especially the bosses, hit hard.
Thankfully, you are able to pick the difficulty at the start of the game. The Exploring difficulty won’t show you where your next mainline object is located while the Journey difficulty will show a marker on your map.
The combat difficulty for Exploring and Journey are the same. If you find the game too hard, then you can try playing in Story mode, which makes you level up faster in addition to weakening enemies. The only problem is that you can’t change difficulty mid game; so, if you want to Story mode, you have to start the game all over again.
If you are a fan of Soulslike, then Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona offers a pretty good 2D interpretation.