SZKELETAL: Estrogen Dracul's Potato Hunger is an absolutely shameless, parodic "yet another Vampire Survivors clone". You play as Kiszczak - a tragicomic character who, after fleeing to Romania for beating up a local bum, has been reduced by chronic potato hunger to the form of Count Dracul. Your task is brain-dead simple: gobble up potatoes, beat up bums and haters, and try not to die, or at least not to fall asleep in front of the screen.
This tragic, AI-slop masterpiece is an interactive, independent monument built for Polish "ludologists" (yes, self-proclaimed game scholars), local industry gatekeepers, and all the rest of the cringeworthy internet drama. Never heard of a Polish ludologist? Good for you. In fact, it's probably for the best - you can easily go ahead and have a thoroughly mediocre time playing this game without understanding a single shred of the inside jokes and local humor surrounding it. Other than that, the game itself is also a highly satirical jab at the mythical project "Skel... let's just say Skeletal: Deadly Shuffle - a game resembling cheap flash creations with very low verticality, directed by a Romanian fugitive.
SZKELETAL was originally a free, browser-based piece of junk, and now (thanks to the naivety and deep pockets of backers) it proudly lands on Steam to peacefully collect virtual dust in your Gabe-blessed library.
🥔 DOES IT EVEN HAVE ANY GAMEPLAY?
Ever played Vampire Survivors? Well, imagine the same thing, but with worse balance, more boring gameplay, and content that's orders of magnitude poorer. You mow down hordes of assets, level up, and upgrade a trashy digital arsenal. With every level, the game throws more enemies at you while you pray the engine (originally cobbled together in HTML and JS with heavy support from hallucinating AI) will survive the tension.
🤡 WHO (AND WHAT) ARE YOU ACTUALLY FIGHTING?
Do you think the game will throw some advanced AI at you? Right. Enemies just blindly walk straight ahead. On your path, you will meet the cream of online game drama, self-proclaimed experts, and hordes of haters generated by soulless algorithms.
Basic Haters, Ludolols and Other Phenomena:
Dadgamer: The plague of gaming. Moves in a sine wave pattern to make it even harder to hit.
Chat's Maciek: Brainless fanatic. Slow, but attacks in groups and desperately tries to surround you.
Baiter: Deceptive opponent. Stops dead in his tracks, only to perform a sudden charge at you.
Troll: Fast and chaotic. Zigzags, aggressively predicts your movement, and explodes on contact.
Digger: Drama spreader. Very fast linear movement. Upon death, splits into two smaller haters.
Skeletal: A relic of abandoned lore. Extremely slow, triple-fed, absolutely immune to knockback and slows.
Bum: Ranged fighter. Keeps his distance, avoids direct confrontation, and cowardly throws bottles at you.
Siege Syndrome: Spawns in a perfect ring. Tough and slow. Explodes after about 40 seconds, detonating everything around.
Elden Hater: Elite tough guy. Performs a special attack every 7 seconds: charges, shoots projectiles, or summons support.
Lumberfuck: The guardian of woodland cringe. Throws rainbow axes that leave a toxic trail. Watch out, or he will cancel you!
Snake Beater: A mobile shrine. Follows you around like a stray dog. Heals you once a minute... as long as you let him beat your snake.
Scumanda: Once the Count's beloved. Now she returns straight from the drama world to contemptuously hurl explosive potatoes at him.
Arkadickuss: Self-proclaimed polymath. Shoots a Glitch-Laser straight out of his bulging eyes. A hit completely scrambles your senses, causing you to temporarily lose control of your movement and the remains of your dignity.
Cow: Passive, just chews grass. You can slaughter her for a few measly potatoes, but why hurt a cow?
Angry Cow: A side effect of your heartless slaughter of innocent ruminants. Fast, furious, and completely immune to slows. It will just charge straight into your face and demolish your sanity.
⚔️ WHAT DO YOU SHOOT WITH?
You start your epic, whopping few-minute crusade with pride - wielding a crude Potato Masher that only tickles mobs horizontally (no range for verticality), and at a pathetically short distance. If, by some miracle, you don't close the game after a minute or two, you will upgrade your weapons to include:
Spit-Poison: An automatic weapon spitting toxic venom at the nearest enemy. Can be upgraded with pierce, speed, or multi-shot perks.
Orbital Potatoes: Artifacts spinning around the Count (because every game in this genre must have something boring floating around you).
Mental Explosion: A periodic outburst of internet drama lore, scattering toxic brain projectiles in all directions.
Ludologist's Lightning: An automatic electrical attack that shocks the nearest enemy and eagerly jumps to other poor souls.
🎁 LUDOBOXES AND PICKUPS
To prevent you from falling completely asleep out of boredom, defeated bosses drop LudoBoxes - invitations to a ludological roulette where you can draw another level of verticality or a brand-new Card of Destiny. Mobs will also occasionally drop Pickups - trash that triggers an instant, often life-saving effect.
You can pick up things like:
Countess's Plate - A relic of lost love. Instantly restores full hunger points.
Gluttony - A short indulgence during which the Count exhibits a powerful, magnetic attraction to scattered potatoes.
LudoGod's Shield - A transcendental aura of 'God Complex' that guarantees Dracul complete, stress-free invulnerability for a few seconds.
Bum's Sneakers - A speed boost on demand. Run away like you just mugged a bum in the park - fast and completely devoid of honor.
BanWave - The final verdict of a streaming platform moderator. Instantly annihilates all nearby haters around the Count.
Chill Out - Triggers 'Extreme Cringe', drastically slowing down all enemies on the screen.
LudoBox - The aforementioned invitation to the ludological roulette. Drops only from Bosses and guarantees a free upgrade to higher tiers of verticality or one of the Cards of Destiny.
🃏 CARDS OF DESTINY
The salt of the earth. In the game you can also collect the iconic Cards of Destiny. These collectibles act like double-edged swords - granting minor (or massive) buffs and sometimes painful debuffs, cast only on your command by throwing them directly onto the shovel.
At the moment, you will find cards such as:
Abyss of Nothingness - The ultimate existential vacuum cleaner. For a dozen seconds, it ruthlessly sucks in absolutely everything: mobs, loot, the remains of your dignity, and hopes for a high score. No batteries required; warranty expires at the moment of use.
Cardboard Decoy - Places a proud cardboard cutout with a matching IQ to your character. Enemies fall for it for a dozen seconds, which says more about them than they would care to admit.
Roll of Destiny - A total surprise. Much like a garbage loot box in a AAA game, except this miserable consolation is actually free. Draws a brand-new card in an available slot.
Thunderous Strike - Oh my god, what just happened? The card calls down an instant, exceptionally malicious thunderstorm.
Quiet Hours - Hey, quiet down! We're turning off the lights because it's 10 PM. Besides, the village ran out of coal for electricity long ago.
Point of Verticality - Use to automatically, without an ounce of effort, ascend to a higher level of verticality.
Chill Out - Freeze the blood in your enemies' veins with your unmatched cringe. Tactical embarrassment makes them move much slower for a while.
Tolerable Day - Is it day already, or just morning? Doesn't matter. The card simply rewinds the clock to 8:00 AM so you can peacefully resume doing whatever you were doing before.
Deadly Shuffle - Blasts all your current cards into outer space and draws brand-new ones in all available deck slots. However, there's a cheeky 21.37% chance that one of the new cards will be Dracul's Demise. Good luck with the roulette.
Dracul's Demise - Had enough of this suffering and want an early ticket to Potato Heaven? Use this card to instantly "log out" of the session and end your agony on your own terms.
Weather Forecast - Rain? Storm? No way. According to my premium forecast, not a single drop will fall for the next 12 hours. A guarantee as reliable as the Romanian pension system.
Baboon's Mockery - A card with the same combat utility as self-proclaimed game scholars. Completely useless, only generating a brief, mocking monkey cackle.
Delicious Potatoes - Suddenly, those gathered potatoes taste so good again that you forget about the remains of your honor, which you didn't have anyway. Receive double points of verticality for the next blissful 20 seconds.
Countess's Plate - Your go-to hunger solver when pride loses to primal instincts. Instantly restores full hunger and saves your butt from a potato starvation death.
LudoGod's Shield - A transcendental bubble on demand. Pop it and enjoy wonderful immortality for a brief period, especially when you start feeling soft.
Bum's Sneakers - A speed boost on demand. Run away like you just mugged a bum in the park - fast and completely devoid of honor.
Beat the Bum! - Grants a massive buff to pummel bums, haters, and others with doubled strength. Violence in this game isn't a question, it's the only answer.
Count's Gluttony - Activate to attract all that potato trash with your gaze alone for 3 precious seconds, without having to bend down and dirty your hands.
BanWave - Play the card, and haters near Dracul are banned instantly. They vanish from the live stream chat faster than they can write "give me back my money".
and more cards, hopefully already in the works...
🏆 WHAT DOES THE STEAM VERSION OFFER?
If you already had the displeasure of trying the browser version, know that it will forever remain a frozen, free piece of trash.
On Steam, you get a fully-fledged, native port on the ElectronJS engine, packed with what matters most in such games:
those famous Steam Achievements - earning the virtual BUM SLAYER badge is an absolute ludonarrative must!
global and local leaderboards - before script kiddies completely ruin them,
new random events - like thunderstorms paralyzing both the player and nearby mobs,
an implemented and moderately polished system of Cards of Destiny,
a dynamic Day/Night and Weather cycle - survive the night where you'll see far less, and experience vertical rain that will only affect your deep irritation with said effect,
Minimap system: Shoving a radar into the corner of the screen so you know roughly where those stationary obstacles (like shrines or ruined buildings) are.
Support for multiple other languages - so the naive suckers who decide to invest in this crap won't have to struggle with the simplest languages of the world, like Polish, Romanian, or, god forbid, English,
and a whole handful of other junk that backers naively paid for.
What else (perhaps) will this piece of junk be improved with before the final release in 2026? Empty promises...
If there is even enough patience for this project... (which I personally doubt, but as they say, fools have all the luck), then besides standard patching of a ton of bugs and other cosmetic QoL trifles, such crazy fantasies rot in the depths of the developer backlog as:
✨ New Mechanics and World Expansion (More features to break):
Perk Reroll: The ability to reshuffle skills upon level-up, bound by some nerf or other penalty.
More destructible junk on the map: Blatant cluttering of the arena with some tombs or other stationary rubbish, besides what the crowdfunders already sponsored. Break this contraption and maybe, out of its grace, it will drop you some more potatoes, Ludoboxes, or other equally useless trinkets.
Gaming collectibles, for those who enjoyed searching for feathers in Assassin's Creed, or other packages in GTA.
🎨 Audiovisuals (So-called Eye Candy):
Lifting of "Chat's Maciek": Malicious repainting of Maciek's sprite, so his mug looks even more like that retarded, original emote from the streaming platform.
Soundtrack expansion: Spewing out more soulless tracks from AI and hooking them into the code, so that this pixel cacophony drills a hole in your stomach at least a bit less during those longer sessions.
🌌 Very long-term plans (The zone of pipe dreams, AI limits and chronic lack of time):
Flood of new mobs - game scholars and ludolols: As the name suggests, some of you have an eminently perverse need to see a much larger number of your favorite "ludologists" in the game to beat up.
New arsenal: Some more beating sticks, fancy skills, or at least evolutions of the junk that is already here.
New perks and cards of destiny: More colorfully glowing bonuses dropping from slain mobs, so Estrogen Dracul has any reason to bend down at all.
Local co-op - because two on the couch is always more fun
and whatever else comes to mind in an act of desperation...
However, I warn you in advance and officially wash my hands of this: I don't promise that any of this will ever see the light of day!
The code is already barely held together by zip ties and spit, so you understand - all of the above are just empty promises to keep fools happy. Buy at your own risk, because refunds are a waste of everyone's time!
