Skull Island: Rise of Kong Has Hilarious Lazy Cutscene

There’s a special place in a lot of gamers’ hearts for the bargain-bin “so-bad-it’s-good” games. Some bad games are disappointments, but others are so downright buggy, lazy, and/or outrageous that they win over a lot of players. Such is the case with Skull Island: Rise of Kong, which was released today.

A day prior, a cutscene from the game made the rounds on Twitter. It drew 14 million views at the time of writing and likely just as many laughs due to its lackadaisical, unbelievable mistakes. Why did it get so popular so fast and what does this mean for the tie-in title?

In the cutscene captured by user RickDaSquirrel, Skull Island: Rise of Kong shows the titular ape confronting a dangerous lizard. However, one cut shows a rectangular picture of it leaping at the screen instead of actually animating the leaping. It’s so jarring that even after several watches, I cannot hold in my laughter.

This isn’t a bug, but rather a deliberate choice that is so low-effort that it becomes a farce. As such, it has drawn an insane amount of impressions for a fifteen-second cutscene on Twitter. There are many awful cutscenes that live rent-free in my head, and this one belongs right there in all its infamy.

GameMill Entertainment has published its fair share of movie/television tie-ins, but Skull Island: Rise of Kong may be low on their list of crowning achievements. With some calling it even worse than 2023’s The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, it may be enough to take the crown for the worst title to come about in 2023.

While there are no official reviews on Metacritic on release day, MKIceandFire has released a full playthrough of the less-than-three-hour game. This is quite the far cry from the cult classic Peter Jackson’s King Kong which received acclaim in 2005. Skull Island: Rise of Kong looks worse almost 20 years later and that’s a travesty.