There are stories of gods told by fanatics, stories of kings told by the oppressed, and fantasy stories told by the gullible. However, the stories of this age-old island are passed on from generation to generation by those willing to tell a much bigger tale: The story of the beasts and their king... The story of Kong.
Skull Island: Rise of Kong is a video game featuring King Kong, developed by IguanaBee, who had previously worked on Star Trek: Resurgence and G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout. It was released on October 17, 2023 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.
The story, which takes elements from Kong: King of Skull Island, features Kong, an orphaned member of a race of giant apes, as he tries to survive on Skull Island with its numerous dangerous animals, all while seeking out Gaw, the monstrous dinosaur who killed his parents.
Tropes:
- Ability Required to Proceed: A big chunk of the game is spent completing missions to earn enough skill points to unlock charged Heavy Attacks, which are required to destroy a rock wall.
- Cel Shading: The graphics have a visual style that evokes comic books.
- Compressed Adaptation: The game is a loose adaptation of Kong: King of Skull Island, but cuts out everything involving humans, focusing almost solely on the conflict between Kong and the Deathrunners. It's unsurprisingly a very short game as a result, since the entire story is simply Kong fighting through various monsters until he defeats Gaw.
- Death World: As is traditional for Skull Island, it is full of all sorts of deadly creatures like surviving theropod dinosaurs, Giant Enemy Crabs, and so on.
- Evil Is Bigger: Every boss in the game is considerably larger than Kong, while most of the mook enemies are about his size. This, in effect, makes Kong look like a normal-sized ape instead of a giant one.
- Excuse Plot: Kong was orphaned by Gaw and seeks vengeance against her. The story doesn't have any twists beyond that.
- Gang Up on the Human: While some of the various creatures will attack each other in the distance, once Kong gets close enough they'll all ignore each other and attack him all at once.
- Giant Spider: One of the most common enemy types is a mainstay of Skull Island fauna, which comes in numerous different species. Indeed, the largest enemy in the entire game by far is a spider.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: The prologue fight against Gaw cannot be won, and it ends when Kong's mother inevitably runs out of health or when Gaw's health drops to half.
- Informed Species: One of the Deathrunner varieties, known as the "Agile Deathrunner", looks nothing like the other variants, more resembling a giant dodo bird with tusks rather than a humanoid raptor.
- It's Personal: The entire story is Kong searching for Gaw to get revenge for Gaw killing his parents when he was a baby.
- More Predators Than Prey: Standard for Skull Island, but exaggerated even further. Every single animal Kong encounters is a vicious carnivore, without exception, unlike every other version which at least showed some herbivores existing (at best, there's a cave painting showing Kong fighting what looks like an ankylosaur).
- Non-Mammal Mammaries: Inverted, strangely. Kong's mother looks exactly like the male apes, despite the fact she should have visibly engorged breasts, as Kong is still a baby at this time.
- Origins Episode: This story is a very condensed version of Kong's life from childhood to how he became "king", as detailed in Kong: King of Skull Island.
- Raptor Attack: The main threat in the story are the Deathrunners, a species of giant, somewhat humanoid dromaeosaurids ruled by Gaw.
- Sand Worm: One of the bosses in the game is a burrowing, worm-like beast called the Earth Gijja. Strangely, its arena is one of the only significantly sandy regions on Skull Island, making one wonder how it even got there. Smaller dirt-burrowing worms can be found elsewhere.
- A Taste of Power: Kong's mother, who is the player character during the tutorial, has some abilities that Kong will have to unlock himself once control shifts to him.
- T. Rexpy: Two of them.
- Instead of a straight tyrannosaur, the closest equivalent is a theropod predator called the "Kernotavr", a giant Carnotaurus-like dinosaur which is covered in feathers and has two fingers on each hand, and suffers the same Jawbreaker finishing move from Kong.
- Close to the end of the game, a second, larger version appears called the "Teropod", which resembles a mashup of a Ceratosaurus and a Spinosaurus, but with tail spikes like a Stegosaurus, which is also finished off by Kong breaking its jaw.note
