Skyling: Garden Defense

Skyling: Garden Defense is a crazily cute classic arcade style game. It was released on Android back in May but has only received 50-100 installs, something I feel to be a crime against games and gamekind everywhere. Considering this is an indie game it feels really polished, I’m yet to encounter a single bug and the general look and feel of it is of an extremely high quality.

You control a little girl named Bloom whose world has been destroyed by Blight Monsters, and everywhere you step you bring life to the ground. The aim of the game is to step on every bit of land without getting eaten by the Blight Monsters. Strangely, your main tool towards reaching this goal is a sleepy cat (and oh my god it makes such a cute noise!). The Blights can’t get past the sleeping cat, so you have to use that to your advantage block their path at strategic points.

The main thing I’m loving about this game though is the art style, which is simplistic, retro and beautiful all at once. Your instructions are given in exquisite text floating in the clouds, and all the graphical elements work so well together: the way the grass grows, general movement and even dying.

The levels aren’t overly long, typically ranging from 1 minute to 3 minutes once you get past the training ones. The original game came with 20 levels, 5 more have been added since and in the longer term who knows, we may even be treated to a few more. There’s a very simple aim of each level, namely to step on every square and collect all the apples without dying. As you’d expect the difficulty ramps up slightly as you go, introducing harder puzzles and smart Blight Monsters along the way. Costing £0.58p, it’s worth it just to play with the sleepy cats – everything after that is a bonus.

The game has been released on multiple platforms, including Windows Phone Store, Windows Store, itch.io, Google Play, OUYA, Amazon Appstore, ios App Store and has been made to work with joysticks, mice, keyboards and touch screens. This combined with the isometric level design means the controls aren’t as easy to master as you might like, and this was the only reason I died in the first 5 levels. It’s very easy to accidentally press the wrong direction and walk head first into a Blight Monster. The developer has put in 3 different touch control systems so you can find the one that feels most natural to you. I ended up using a controller with joysticks when playing on my Shield, but I’m sure different styles will suit different people. Aside from the interesting controls I cannot fault the game and am eagerly looking forward to what Mighty Studios LLC do with their next game.

Video of the gameplay if your on the fence.