Fancy Skulls is a moderately difficult FPS Roguelite game in Steam's Early Access area and the last update was from March 2015. The forum page for this game has players stating that development has died and the dev has moved on to another title. The dev mentions in these posts that they are working on it and updates will eventually come.

Despite all this, the game is in a playable enough state to play through now. v0.7.5.1 was the build I played today, in case any updates do eventually appear.

There's no story to this game. Not on the store page or in the game itself. You are simply dropped into a large open green room with a pistol and some basic control instructions and are off.

As a roguelite, you have to navigate through a simple maze of connected rooms trying to find a blue light column elevator to the next floor, of which there are nine in total. A map is accessible that shows you cleared rooms, unexplored connected rooms, and any missed treasure.

It does appear right in the centre of the screen with zero transparency and is best checked when you are in a safe area, remembering to turn it off and not forgetting the key bindings like I did more than a few times.

Rooms are made of three main types. Combat rooms, challenge rooms, and treasure rooms. When you start off you are given no idea on what to do with any of them, but if you've played any related game genre you should be able to figure it out with zero difficulty.

Combat happens in real time as a basic FPS game with WASD+Mouse. For an indie indev title it plays very smoothly. I've come across too many indev games that have floaty controls or poor aiming. Aim with the mouse and shoot the gun with left click, a special weapon can be activated with a right click but you have to acquire one first.

Enemies that you first encounter only need a few shots to destroy but give you a decent variety to destroy. Combat rooms lock after entering them and you have to destroy every enemy to continue.

Enemies also do not appear by default in any room or throughout the map. In a Combat room, a large white dodecahedron shape is found in the centre. Running over this will send a no-clip attack to black smoking eggs that sit around the room. A second later, the eggs hatch with the monsters and they immediately attack.

In some cases you may activate an item or chest in the room that also hatches the eggs. In both cases there is enough time to enter the room and finding the best position to start the combat from.

Challenge rooms work the same basic way as Combat rooms, except require a perfect run to complete and acquire three room Crowns. Don't get hit. Don't miss a shot. And finish the room quickly. Thankfully these are optional and as long as you avoid the egg activator you can run through them and into the next one.

Enemy variety is nicely varied. In the first few levels you encounter:

• A red monster that chases and claws at you.
• A slow moving floating 3D primitive that shoots slow moving shots.
• A spindly white humanoid that has no attacks, but which spawns floating red capsules. These things will beep and home in on you if you get too near and explore in a blast radius. It is possible to shoot them back into the spawning monster and take it out with the blast rather than multiple pistol shots.
• Various turrets, which either shoot rotating laser beams you need to jump over or set directional pulses to weave through. Or do what I do and hide behind wall geometry and take them out on timing.
• Fixed enemies that can shoot in your direction with a time delay. Slightly different from turrets as they turn to face you, but otherwise can not move.

Later levels slowly introduce variations on these and different types, while increasing the stats of the earlier ones.

To aid you in this you do eventually find different weapon types. Early ones are the Rocket Launcher, Assault Rifle, and Shotgun. They do have limited ammo and you can only have one additional weapon at once, dropping the older one if you try to collect another.

Throughout the levels you also come across small terminals that allow you to buy weapon mods. These apply for any weapon type and you don't need to have it for it to work. You buy using coins you collect from chests or by clearing rooms with the three crown requirements.

And finally, special attacks and powerups. These use 'Mana' which slowly refills over time. They range from firing out a huge blast of attacks, to collecting every item in the level in one instant.

Fancy Skulls does look really basic and even unfinished and I do feel that it could do with some polish and design upgrades. Rooms feel small but with too high a ceiling. The art style is rather cartoonish and unique but is let down by level wall/floor colour choices.

Even though Fancy Skulls is still in Early Access, the game is complete enough to play through. There's enough content here to keep you entertained for a few hours.

There's some nice ideas here that will hopefully be expanded upon and improved if the dev ever comes back to working on it. For now, worth a shot if you are into the genre or indies. But if you've only a passing interest best wait for a sale as the difficulty level can be a bit of a turn off.

Game Acquisition: Purchased on Sale (Bundle Stars)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Thread: 1 - 13 March 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009

OS: Windows XP
Processor: 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 500 MB available space