SKALD: Against the Black Priory

I enjoyed this game over all, but it's a mixed experience. The atmosphere, world building, and music are all top notch. Combat is mixed. It honestly almost feels too simple and down the line makes combat feel pretty repetitive. It's also pretty easy, at least on normal mode. Spells are really stingy with mana management early on, and you need food for full rest recovery when camping... but by mid game, if even that, you're swimming in so many resources it practically doesn't matter anymore. I'm a huge fan of 'actual' eldritch horror, you know, physical entities and knowledge being actually unknowable and dangerous to the human mind and soul, unfathomable things from beyond time and space... rather than the usual modern "Lovecraft is when you add tentacles" or when games let you somehow kill eldritch gods that should warp or unmake you just from you being near the tip of their imagination. This game nails the concept perfectly rather than trying to force a setting premise that doesn't fit into a power fantasy story. You can tell the dev rushed parts of development though, or perhaps ran out of steam. There are a number of strangely unfinished or half implemented mechanics, like how the prologue had a bunch of rp flavor choices that don't seem to do anything and pretty much only exist in the early game and first island(to an extent). Everything after this is 'very' linier with role play choices in dialogue flat out vanishing for the rest of the game. There is also a 'faction' system that only seem to place factions at hostile or neutral, but does not 'actually' seem to do anything. After the first island, there are still a few nice optional quest. I liked the one about the festival, without getting into spoilers... but the rest of the game is very lacking in terms of locations and content to a pretty noticeable degree. That all being said, I still liked the game, and would love to see another in the setting from this dev in the future. I have no clue if they have any plans to make more games though.

The core idea here is kind of cute, ultima/goldbox throw back. The Good: Dripping with beautiful old school revival pixel art rife with dithering. If you're not sick of lovecraft (yet) then you'll really appreciate the oppressively dark atmosphere. Some characters aren't entirely cardboard (which is nice) and characterization happens quickly through dialogue (although some choices don't really affect anything other than vibes.) I appreciate the full character customization at the beginning. I chose the normal difficulty and found the intended experience was adequately fun (once I remade my character with an un-gimped build; build choices are permanent and cannot be respec'd.) The game makes an interesting choice by forcing the player to choose who is the current active character in the world - this solves a lot of problems present in bigger games, but also introduces a core problem: You will be compelled to save-scum when a random world skill check arbitrarily lands on a character who is ill-spec'd to deal with it. The Bad: It tries to pull in several Larian touches and translate them to a strictly 2D view. This is a cool idea, but what Larian does with their player UX is very complex and already strained at the limit of current design patterns. I respect the developer's ambition here but I do not like some of the mechanical UX in the game. Clicking to attack (and subsequently kill) an enemy will place you in their space if they die - for some reason. You will constantly be "bumping" into objects that you cannot interact with. You will constantly be checking to see what is interactive and what isn't. You will constantly be fighting to see what spells you have, what they do, and then guessing which mouse-click is required to view spell and status effects - this problem stems from the way they implemented the window-on-window wiki style information diving. The music is just okay.

Recommended with a caveat. Mechanics are fine, but I was engaged by the setting, prose, and pacing of the game for 90% of the way through. That said, the ending feels like a fumble to me. Yes, it's a lovecraftian story so I didn't expect a happy ending, but even still it left a bitter taste in my mouth. A couple of plots feel like they're dropped for a reveal which felt like a bait and switch bordering on "rocks fall everyone dies". The journey there is fun though!

tl;dr: a genuinely compelling dark fantasy CRPG with excellent writing, atmospheric dread, and satisfying tactical combat. Let down by visual clutter, some unfulfilled ambition, and a handful of bugs. Highly recommended to fans of old-school RPGs who can tolerate rough edges and enjoy 8-bit/16-bit style graphics. Skald Beyond the Black Priory is a top-down 2D RPG with sprite animation clearly inspired by the SSI Gold Box games and Ultima V–VI. grid-based, chunky, and deliberately retro in presentation. Set in a bleak medieval Europe shot through with Lovecraftian dread, you play the son of a former master-at-arms to a wealthy and powerful noble family. They've dispatched you to the Outer Isles, a vestigial outpost of the empire, to locate their missing daughter, who left on a quest and never returned. The world you arrive in is oppressive, strange, and deeply hostile. What happens next kept me wanting to find out. Of modern RPGs, the closest comparison I can make is Serpent in the Staglands, it occupies a similar niche of throwback design philosophy with modern sensibilities. I completed the game on a first playthrough on Linux, Normal difficulty. Character creation gives you the expected suite of options: Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, and various hybrids inbetween. with attribute and skill point allocation, gender, and portrait selection. The game does not acknowledge your class choice or gender in dialogue or narrative, and there's no respec once you're in. I clocked in under 30 hours, but only about ~20-25 was playing. I chose Bard, which proved an excellent call: a decent blend of combat capability, social skills, and magic. Early on you acquire a rogue companion who becomes my party's skill monkey, freeing me to lean into the areas the Bard excels at. The party fills out over time, and once it does, the game opens up considerably. Expect the 20% mark to be the hardest stretch, game becomes much easier once the party fills outs. Do not roll a dedicated spellcaster on your first run. Magic is extremely weak in the early game and it will leave you struggling. Food and recipes are abundant, resting is actively encouraged, and there's a crafting system for potions and food worth engaging with. Stealing from vendors is possible, but I rarely found it necessary. The game carries a memory leak that makes itself known after long sessions, ~5 hours was around the point I noticed performance degrading. Quitting and reloading cleared it, but it's worth keeping in mind. Loading a late save led to a bugged final battle for me, which I managed to push through, but it was a reminder to save frequently across multiple slots rather than overwriting a single file. Save corruption isn't something I experienced, but I wouldn't take chances. The post-ending screen offered no exit option and required a force quit. Minor, but fraustrating note to end on. The Good: The writing and characters are the game's genuine strength. The mood is dark and oppressive in exactly the way it's aiming for, and the narrative kept pulling me forward. Combat is fluid and satisfying. Accessible enough to pick up quickly but with enough depth to reward thinking about positioning. Backstabbing is particularly good: set your Rogue up correctly and the damage inflicted you see are enormously gratifying. When it clicks, it really clicks. Art and music style is personal, but I personally enjoyed these very much. Music sticks to the midi limitations of the early 90s it was based off. I don't enjoy puzzles in RPGs much, but most of these (except for the final few) were fine. There is no automap, but one isn't required, maps are small enough and give enough details for you to easily navigate them. The Bad: The game is visually busier than the classics it clearly draws from. Where the Gold Box games and late Ultima titles had a clean, readable aesthetic, Skald layers on detail to the point that it can work against you. Traversable and impassable tiles are sometimes distinguished only by a slightly darker shade, which causes real navigation friction. Combat readability suffers for the same reason, clicking the wrong square is a recurring annoyance. You may find yourself defaulting to right-click movement over WASD to compensate. The in-game lore card system is a good idea to burrow from modern RPGs: click a keyword, get a card with relevant information, click further keywords from that card to learn deeper. but the implementation is buggy. Only two levels of information windows can be open simultaneously, and keyword hashtags are applied inconsistently. For anything related to spells, you're better served going directly to the spell menu. There's also a faint sense throughout of ambition that outran scope. Factions operate on a simple binary of neutral or hostile, you can feel a more complex reputation system was once planned. A few characters are introduced with enough weight and specificity that you expect them to matter, only to disappear without resolution once the plot moves on. Some lore threads are opened and never closed. None of this breaks the game, but it leaves you with the impression of a world that was meant to be larger than the one you got. The Ugly: Skill checks are triggered by walking into rooms or interacting with objects, and they will only draw on whichever party member is currently selected. An automatic assignment to the character best suited for the check would have worked better. As the party increases, the maps become more and more claustraphic. Most fights are mob fights in restricted environments, Conclusion: Skald: Beyond the Black Priory is a flawed but thoroughly enjoyable retro revival. Its excellent writing elevates the experience, the cosmic-horror atmosphere is genuinely effective, and the combat remains engaging despite the cramped maps. It is a highly impressive effort for a solo developer. If you have the patience for visual noise and can stomach some clunky UI decisions, you will find a dark, absorbing CRPG that is well worth your time. I might not be a huge rush to play it again, but absolutely would like to return to this world in a new game.

SKALD gets a positive, just about. SKALD emulates the aesthetic of late 80's, early 90's RPGs and Roguelikes. Think Ultima 6, for those who are old enough. While the intended effect I'm sure is retrospective charm and nostalgia, the reality is that it is ugly by today's standards (and was ugly in the 90s by absolute standards), and it can be quite difficult to interpret what's going on. The combat mechanics are, initially, difficult to the point of being unfair, but ultimately become trivial as your party of characters levels up enough to probably establish their builds. The stand-out is the narrative, lore and world-building, as was often the case for the games SKALD was clearly inspired by. It is perhaps a little surprising then that SKALD ends on a deus ex machina plotpoint, and rather unsatisfyingly at that. This, and a lesser-developed second half of the game suggest the developer running out of steam a little towards the end. But, the price point, and strong delivery otherwise, still make for a compelling tale, and something a bit different from most modern takes on the genre.

It's not a particularly long game, though at the $3.50 sale price I can't be angry at 21 hrs for a single playthrough. It's a good game for it's price. Feels like a love-letter both to lovecraftian cosmic horror and to an older genre of RPGs. That said, it's not riddled with infuriating moments unlike actual older games from the 80s-90s so that's good. The game is here to tell a story and let you stab monsters, not here to make you rip your hair out over a horribly-designed puzzle or terribly designed combat encounters (cough cough, unlike say Pathfinder: Kingmaker, cough cough), and similarly the controls/mechanics feel relatively intuitive and modern. Earlygame has a few challenging moments and the game will not hesitate to drive the point home when the tutorial tells you to use Kat's stealth to skip some encounters. The ending is... I don't want to spoil it but the genre is cosmic horror; mere mortals rarely meet happy endings in these types of stories. Still, the game does a good enough job telling its story and the gameplay was smooth enough that I don't feel cheated by the ending. I'd actually say the game's short playtime works to the storyline's advantage here: I don't think I'd be willing to say goodbye to this cast of characters in the way it happened if the game made me invest more time in this setting. I admit, when I first wishlisted this game my biggest concern was the graphics: I'd say the game looks much better than the storepage implies: the character in-game sprites are somewhat abstract, but the game makes up for that with some very, very detailed environmental artwork. The bottom of a grimy sewer does in fact look and feel like a different environment than the inside of a tavern or a robber-queen's treasure hoard, or a decadent wizard's tower full of--uhh--"artistic" depictions of the female form, or the inside of an HR-Giger-esque ancient tomb. I do recommend this game for anyone looking for an RPG to kill a few hours with. It's not here for a long time, but it's a good time. I don't think this game needed to be longer, but I would love the idea of a sequel.

Combat was a bit tricky in the beginning but after a few levels you got in the flow of it and I never found it becoming too easy or repetitive in my playthrough. The story also had me hooked from start to finish.

Excellent game through and through. Oldschool rpg with good story, interesting world to interact with, fun mechanics and level of freedom. A lot of love went into this game. Thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Easily worth $15