A new demo popped up this week, with Trina Interactive sharing a first look at its upcoming slot machine roguelike, Slots & Skulls.
The slot machine roguelike sub-genre, such as it is, has been growing ever since Luck Be A Landlord proved just how awesome these deckbuilder variants could be.
There are multiple ways to do a slot machine roguelike, and Trina has done it in quite a charming manner, I think. Where Slots & Daggers, an obvious comparison point, places your opponents in a screen-within-a-screen, Trina Interactive puts the slot machine on the left and your enemy on the right.
Yes, the graphics are fairly simple, but I thought they were charming enough. The animations are simple, too, but they’ve been delivered with a bit of personality.
In Slots & Skulls, you must defeat enemies to collect spells and items, and then add them to your pool of available actions. Once collected, they’ll appear during that run, so you can try them out and work out what they do.
At the end of that run/stage, you must go to the Anvil and upgrade the items that you’ve earned. Anything you don’t recycle or upgrade is then lost, which I thought was a neat system, and then it’s time to go back for another run.
Each run begins with you picking three starter items, but you quickly add more into the mix. I quite liked the simple but effective gear levelling system and how it has been integrated into the gameplay loop. I also liked how the overall experience felt pleasingly tactile.
With games like CloverPit already proving that this sub-genre has chops, there’s steep competition already waiting for Slots & Skulls. Trina Interactive has work to do, but my first impression of this new slot machine roguelike is that it has the potential to be pretty good.
The overall quality of Slots & Skulls will, in large part, depend on those late-game synergies, and that’s not something you can really judge from a demo like this. It’s a good first showing, though, and it’s playable on PC on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
