SKALD: Against the Black Priory

It has everything, that I wish of a retro game. It brings back the good parts of old games and the reason, why they were kept in good memory. But at the same times it brings more or less modern ui standards and controls. Note for the dev: It would have been even fun, if some small improvements would have been integrated like: - mousewheel scrolling - sorting / ordering / filtering the inventory Other than that: Great experience for an old guy like me ;)

The choices you make don't really matter. The story is grim, brutal and is reason enough to explore every single place in the game to the last spot in order not to miss a single piece of macabre pixel art.

Mechanics: The character creation system is pretty deep and seems to be inspired by D&D. It was hard to choose a class as I kind of wanted to play them all. I eventually settled on Armsmaster. Visuals: While some love the retro look, I know the low res / pixelated graphics will turn some people off. For me it's not exactly a plus, but I can tolerate it as long as I can tell what's going on, which I usually can. Initially it's a bit difficult to distinguish between characters in combat, but I got used to it after awhile. I've seen some complain about having a hard time reading the pixelated text but with the customization options I didn't find it to be a problem. Audio: The music is really cool. SFX are great as well. No complaints there. Story: Excellent! Better than average writing for sure. It's a fairly dark fantasy game with cosmic horror (i.e., Lovecraftian) elements. Cons: I found the game to be a bit too easy even though I played on hard difficulty. In particular I would love to see the final battle tweaked to be much harder. Probably my only other complaint with the game is a design decision: when one of your party members is downed during combat they won't get XP for that encounter, meaning squishy characters can lag behind your warriors in terms of leveling up. It makes players want to reload every time someone is knocked out. Very annoying IMO. Fortunately, I'm not the only one who dislikes this and the developer implied that he'll probably make this an optional setting in an upcoming patch. Final thoughts: I love this game and it left me wanting more. Here's hoping for DLC / sequel of some sort.

SKALD is a very fun game that can get a bit repetitive, and suffers with its rushed finale. Combat is not the games strong point, as most fights you'll find yourself using the same combo pretty much every time. Enemies don't seem to have any real strategy to them other than hit them as much as possible in each round. If you're downed in the fight, don't worry you'll pop right back up after with no health and "wounds" which are instantly removed from a rest with food (which you will have endless amounts of by mid to late game). As to the characters and story, they are not given a very long time for development. The overall story of a distant threat gradually getting closer to destroy humanity is extremely rushed at the end with a quick explanation of some other massive entity being able to stop it, albeit with a sacrifice (which is part of an infinite time loop... or something like that). It is a very fun game though, and the story will keep you moving forward, but the developer would have been better off expanding more on some of the characters and building up to the ending instead of the abrupt way it ended.

Sometimes, you see old games and get a flood of style, mood, and feelings, but when you go and play them, you find a bunch of barriers to your immersion from clunky UIs, accessibility constraints, outdated UX, among other things, which is normal and a product of their time. This game is all of the things you crave from these experiences without the cons. Skald oozes with theme. This game has personality. Skald has a dark tone that feels natural and immersive. The story is intriguing and features deep lore and meaningful choices with great writing. Character customization is varied and fun. The pixel art is beautiful and impactful. The surface has all the old school cRPG mood, but features deep modern sensibilities that take the experience to a different level. It's worth noting that upon seeing this game, my wife immediately said it's basically what she thinks of when picturing something I like. So huge thanks for making this game.