The problem with raising an undead horde is that it's a scattershot approach to building an army. Sure, you get a ton of cannon fodder, but it's all coming from the buried remains of whoever's available. Most corpses will be brainless minions looking to fill in the empty caverns in their skulls with whatever they can scavenge from the living, but all it takes is accidentally resurrecting a hero to see all those evil plans reduced to bony ruins. Skellboy is an action-adventure about a versatile hero who would have been quite content to remain dead, but a jilted magician went full-on Toxic Masculinity. Instead of doing the sensible thing of getting drunk, listening to terrible music, and buying something big and stupid, he summoned the undead to ravage the kingdom of Cubold.
As breakup plans go it's a fairly epic way to make everyone else suffer while not doing a thing to fix the ache in one's soul, but the mass exhumation caught up the skeletal hero Skippy in its necromantic net. Skippy has seen better days, seeing as at the start he doesn't even have feet, but fortunately there's a skeletal pair lying nearby his grave. His forgotten grave was right near the castle's stage, which fortunately has a cheap cardboard sword sitting on it, so after a quick moment to equip feet for jumping and a weak sword for bopping, Skippy sets out to get the lay of the land. Which, as it turns out, is currently being overrun by zombies.
The problem with zombies is that they're cheap and plentiful but not too sturdy. This means they're great when all you've got is a cardboard sword but terrible to scavenge for spare parts. Skippy can swap out his head, body, feet and weapon to acquire new abilities, but the initial zombie droppings are all downgrades that lower his HP. On the plus side if he finds zombie feet, head, and torso he can walk right on through the enemies with no need to fight, so there are advantages to a matching set. For general usage, though, it may be best to power up rather than down.
The demo at PAX East took Skellboy from his humble beginnings through the first boss fight, wandering around the castle that's the central area of the entire game. After the staging area (pun most likely intended) and its warm-up zombie fight came a walk atop the battlements to another courtyard, this time with the castle knights herding the rest of the stragglers to safety. The next area over, though, had a cubold (like a kobold but more square) with a club, which is the first weapon to have a special attack. A quick tap does a slow attack while holding down the button charges the club, the latter of which was necessary to clear a pile of debris from that path. After that came a moral dilemma, with a knight trapped in a guillotine. You can let him go or drop the blade, with different rewards for each action, but getting the murderous reward comes with the taint of evil and a stain on your soul so it's hard to say if it's worth it or not.
As the demo went on the level design started to reveal itself, with the path through the castle grounds showing that it was a trip right back to where Skippy started, except the lever at the top of the battlements lowered the drawbridge to the outside world. This led to a hedge maze, a crypt and eventually a boss fight against a skeletal magic-user with some clever attack patterns. For a small ten-minute slice of game it contained a nice variety of locations, and if the combat was a bit simple it was also the very beginning area of the game and the boss encounter was a nice hint of more complicated encounters to come. Even if the fighting doesn't get fleshed out it would still be hard to resist Skellboy due to its art style, which looks a bit like 3D sprites and thick papercraft where the front and back of an object are textured while the edges are solid black. It's a lot of fun to see in motion and the demo didn't even show the enemies so big they need multiple voxel-planes to animate.
The little taste of I got of Skellboy showed a fun, cute adventure loaded with plenty of small details that added life to its "run around and hit monsters" gameplay. There was a ton of personality in the game, from the obvious characters and enemies to small details like the way hay bales fall apart into their component panels when broken. The kingdom may be under siege but it's more than just a background for combat and a distinct character that just happens to be overrun by monsters at the moment. There's plenty of goofiness and action to discover in the semi-8-bit diorama-lands of Skellboy and a skeleton with interchangeable parts is just the undead hero for the job.
https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU19434/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejm54u3Yb5Q