Given the number of games to survive and collect resources in the midst of a zombie or some other apocalypse, you can decide that today it is not only the most popular, but also the easiest genre. However, the difficulty is just to do something unusual, something that stands out against the background of competitors who have flooded the market. The Russian studio Mandragora, together with the German publisher and developer Daedalic Entertainment , managed to stand out ...

Skyhill offers a very unusual formula for survival. A young businessman, Perry Jason arrived in a nameless city on business, rented a VIP penthouse in the most luxurious hotel, and a couple of days later his mansions turned into a fortified base. A long war between the Confederation and New Europe (yes, the action takes place in an alternative universe) has turned into a massive biological attack, and now most people either died or turned into monsters. Including the inhabitants of the hotel Skyhill, which lives Perry Jason.

Before him a dilemma arose as to how to die: either from despair, hunger and thirst in his securely protected room, or bravely, in battle, trying to escape all the same. Perry chose the second, and now we together with him will gradually descend one hundred stories down to the exit, along the way gathering resources and fighting monsters.

The most important resource for Perry is food. Each descent into one flight of stairs down and each entering the room to the left or to the right of it takes a certain amount of food, and when its stocks go to zero, the character will lose points of health. Descent on the elevator is less expensive, but electricity does not work on many floors, and we have to repair it, spending precious resources and resources on it.

Rummaging boxes, boxes, shelves and corpses with the mouse, you will find a variety of foods - a high-calorie chocolate bar or, for example, rotten Bulgarian pepper, which will poison you with a probability of 50% and take 8 points of health. Something must be eaten immediately - especially when the famine approaches, and next to it there is no saving elevator. And it's better to bring something to your room: there, in the kitchen, you can prepare from a variety of ingredients some more nutritious dish.

There, in the VIP-room, there is a workbench and a bed. On the bed you sleep - every hour of rest makes you hungrier, but restores health. However, during a dream something unexpected can happen - a nightmare will occur, or, for example, someone will wake up with a screaming cry. In this case, rest will not bring the desired relief. If you dream something good and nobody disturbs, then the effect, of course, will be even more favorable than you expected.

To reduce the likelihood of trouble, you need to make an "upgrade" for the front door. And for sleep to restore more health, it is necessary to improve the bed. All this can be done on a workbench. On it, you make different useful things from the found junk (gears, sticks, nails, electrical tape, generator and so on) that will go to the arrangement of the room (including the kitchen and the bench), to make different weapons, as well as to repair the elevator equipment.

Finally, Perry can independently make medicines from found bandages, tablets and bottles of alcohol. Recipes at the same time it is available initially, and the "upgrade" of the workbench and the kitchen opens up new ones.

Hunger is not an aunt, but monsters are even worse - they can send even the well-fed Perry to the forefathers. Especially if he fights with his bare hands. "Firearms" in Skyhill no, so you have to use knives, cleaver, pipes and even mops. On the bench you can make something more powerful. Or, to bargain some steep double-edged sword from one of the few survivors, accidentally met on one of the floors, in exchange for a sandwich with cheese.

The battles themselves are always dueling, and step by step. Each attack in turn, while you can choose the area of defeat - in the head, in the hands or in the trunk. To get to the head, of course, is more difficult, but the damage will be greater. Perry misses much more often than monsters, but his health initially at times more. True, on the lower floors (not to mention the first) there are very tenacious and impressive mutants.

To hit harder and harder, to evade attacks more often and get a chance for an additional move, you need to "pump" the appropriate characteristics - "accuracy", "strength", "agility" and "speed". And the experience here is given for every victory in the battle, as well as for some other actions - for example, if Perry finds a computer in one of the rooms and talks to an unknown, adorable riddles.

Mechanics Skyhill is simple, and somewhere even primitive. Recipes are available initially, they can not be disassembled, battles are rudimentary, there is no detailed generation of the character, no firearms, moral choice and a stress-resistance parameter.

But here there is a random generation of levels and all their contents. Here it is necessary to say that the game is originally designed for the fact that you can not get to the lower floor on the first attempt. The player will repeatedly try to descend further - and this will reveal to him new "perks" (active and passive) that will help in the new passage. One, for example, allows you to instantly eat up to the heap, another - to build an "upgrade" for the number free, the third reduces the amount of food that is spent on the descent down, but increases the chance to get poisoned when eating. And this is not the whole list.

So, with every new descent, all content is generated anew in a random way. Therefore, you never know when and where you will find a powerful cleaver, you will meet a survivor who will offer a profitable exchange, or you will notice a phone with SMS informing about a stash on the 86th floor ... All this, of course, raises the factor of randomness to the skies, but so the game becomes unpredictable, and therefore more interesting.

It's also interesting to collect different diary entries, audio files and newspaper clippings that shed light on what happened in this world and how it came to this life.

Rate:7/10