survivors

With Skigill, the classic RPG skill tree becomes a crowded battlefield

The stark presentation can threaten to be overwhelming at times, especially when nearly the entire screen descends into a mass of yellow pixels. But the simplicity of the colors also makes it easy to unfocus your eyes and instinctually plan a path away from the red and yellow threats and through to the safety of the inky black void.

Skigill also benefits from allowing players to speed up or slow down time with a quick tap of the shoulder buttons. This is a lifesaver for the tedium of the early parts of runs, when the enemies are coming in at a relative trickle and you don’t want to stand around waiting for the actual challenging part of the run.

Thankfully, you can fast-forward through the early-run doldrums… Credit: Achromi

Where Skigill suffers most, for the moment, is in an overall lack of variety. The recent Early Access release only has three playable characters and four skill-tree maps. While they differ in some important ways, the options fall far short of the dozens of arcane unlockable options that can keep players coming back to a game like Vampire Survivors for dozens of hours.

For replayability, Skigill currently relies on a difficulty system that simply scales up the quantity and health of enemies alongside a secondary skill tree that lets you purchase more permanent upgrades from the main menu. Unfortunately, even at the higher difficulty levels, you’ll see the same four yellow-on-black enemies filling your immediate vicinity, with little in the way of interesting movement or attack patterns to mix things up.

The developers promise on Steam that Skigill will see at least three new characters “along with more weapons and build possibilities” as it goes from Early Access to a Version 1.0 launch. We’re happy to hear that, because even this limited, somewhat repetitive taste of the game has had us coming back for the fun take on an old RPG staple.

Desktop Survivors 98 is more than just a retro Windows nostalgia trip

desktop, gaming, microsoft, retro, survivors, Vamprie Survivors, Windows, windows 95, windows 98 / Kelly Newman / May 23, 2025

If that kind of nostalgia were all there was to Desktop Survivors 98, it would probably not be worth much more than a 15-minute demo. But the underlying game actually takes the developing Survivors-like genre in some interesting directions.

As usual for the genre, the gameplay here centers around navigating through throngs of encroaching enemies (and their projectiles), all while herding those enemies together so your auto-firing weapons can take them out. Defeated enemies drop gems that are crucial to gaining new weapons and powers that also lean heavily on nostalgic computing gags—I particularly liked one weapon based on the “flower box” screensaver and another based on the “bouncing cards” at the end of a successful Solitaire game.

Theming aside, the main element that sets Desktop Survivors apart from its predecessors in the genre is the mouse-based controls. Your old-school mouse pointer is your character here, meaning you get to precisely dodge and dart around the screen with all the speed and accuracy you’d expect from such a flexible input device.

Once you move through these dungeons with a mouse, you won’t want to go back to a joystick.

While there is a serviceable Steam Deck mode designed for analog stick-based movements, it’s a hard control paradigm to return to after experiencing the freedom and speed of mouse movements. Decades of mouse use have likely been preparing you for just this moment, training you to weave your pointer through the tight, quickly closing spaces between enemies without really having to think about it.

More of the same?

Desktop Survivors also sets itself apart by taking place on a series of single-screen battlefields rather than smoothly scrolling maps. These rooms don’t feature any significant obstacles or walls to block your movements, either, making each enemy room play kind of similarly to the ones you’ve seen before it. This also makes it a little easier to avoid many enemies simply by scrubbing your mouse pointer in a wide circle, causing the enemy horde to bunch up in comical blobs.

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