You came to this city for a few days on business, so you decided "Why not spend those days in style?". You booked a room at the Skyhill, a luxury hotel. What room? Why the penthouse of course. Top floor, with the latest biological defense system. You could not have picked a better time to be there, because not long after, a biological warhead lands smack dab in the city, and you can see the green mushroom cloud from your window. Nobody is left to answer the phone, but you can hear screaming outside... then growling... then scraping. But after a few days, you've run out of food.
You ultimately decide you would rather be torn apart by whatever's out there than starve to death in the penthouse. So, you decide to leave the safety of the penthouse and make the long trek down one hundred floors populated by ravenous bloodthirsty mutants to exit the building.
Skyhill
is a Roguelike Survival RPG by Mandragora Games. It was released on Steam on October 6th, 2015.
A 3D isometric top-down sequel, Skyhill: Black Mist, is scheduled for release on May 28, 2020.
Skyhill contains examples of:
- After the End: The game is set in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war.
- All Just a Dream: You're a test subject in a repeated simulation of a mutant apocalypse, to analyze anti-mutant survival techniques and mutant fighting patterns. If you don't overpower the simulation, the scientists execute you once you've outlived your usefulness.
- Apocalyptic Log: In the form of casette tapes. You can also find newspaper clippings and abandoned cell phones with messages on them.
- Bloody Handprint: Can sometimes appear in rooms.
- Door to Before: The elevator is working. Unfortunately, most of the doors are jammed or broken, so you have to climb down and fix them with parts first. Some doors are just locked and require the appropriate keycard to jump down early. The elevators can take you past several floors, saving you a long trek and keeping your hunger down.
- Driven to Suicide: Some rooms contain a guy hanging from the ceiling by a noose. Poke them for loot.
- Fantastic Nuke: After a series of unfortunate events depreciated traditional thermonuclear weapons, the superpowers chose biological warfare as their new fad. It's basically a nuke (mushroom cloud included), but with property damage / radiation poisoning replaced with a feral mutant apocalypse.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: The player character must eat constantly to stay alive, and he can also burn calories by sleeping to miraculously heal grievous injuries.
- Item Crafting: You can do this to get better weapons and food.
- Location Title: The game is named after the hotel it's set in.
- Mushroom Cloud: A huge green one in the intro cutscene.
- Mutant: The hotel is full of them.
- No Conservation of Energy: A staple of the game's "cooking" system. While it's understandable that a cooked fish will be better to eat than a raw one, it's unclear how exactly spreading a stick of butter onto a piece of bread would get you more calories than eating the two separately.
- One-Word Title: Skyhill, of course.
- Red Herring: throughout the game, you'll come across notes that talk about a psycho that kills people call The Mechanic, with heavy implications that you're The Mechanic. When you get to the bottom of the hotel and run outside, you'll be screaming about the monsters inside the hotel, but the police will only see the humans that you killed in your delusions and gun you down. But it's all fake: see All Just a Dream.
- Turn-Based Combat: The game uses this in encounters with mutants. With each turn, you get to decide which part of the mutant to attack.
