SKALD: Against the Black Priory Steam Charts & Stats

Tl;dr 7/10 This is a wonderful loveletter to classic rpgs in a lovely little bitesized lovecraftian horror story. +There's plenty of party customization for you to tackle the challenges in the game +lovely pixel art of various scenes of beauty to body horror. +A fair price tag, especially if it goes on discount +Tactical Combat is simple and clean, easy to understand and expand upon. +While I haven't experienced it, the game has modding support. +Class Customization is there, and you can make interesting builds. (Like for example, my main character started as an Officer, and I built them as a dodge tank that gives orders to his party members) +Rewarded for exploration and trying to tackle obstacles in different ways. -Story is a tad cliche near the end, and doesn't have any replayability as there are no meaningful choices to the story aside from completing quests or not. -There is no character roleplay options, your characters follow a script, and either succeed or fail at checks. You either have a Named story character in your party for their dialogue options, or you don't and have a blank slate npc joining you to fill a role. -Very rare obtuse methods for continuing in the story. (incredibly rare, had to look up how to proceed in a certain area, as all paths forward in the main path led to death except for an extremely obscure method) All in all, pretty good game! I enjoyed my time with it. I'll be on the lookout for their next game, and hope they add more roleplaying elements!

Good game that has one of the best first halves of a horror RPG I've ever played. The art, prose, and graphics are absolutely the show stealers here. After about the middle of the game though things start to taper off. The locations aren't as intricate, you'll hit everything interesting in your character's build by level 12/13, and there are some frustrating encounters that probably shouldn't be in the game(it does seem like everyone has the same least favorite area). Also wasn't really sold on the last few hours of plot but I did appreciate the ending. It doesn't feel like the developer ran out of time, but it does feel like they cut the scope of the project pretty far into development. It's a complete game and I really enjoyed it, but I do wonder how much better it would have been had there been more.

This whole game was a mixed bag. The artstyle is phenomenal and it is truly a treat to behold. The sound design too is wonderful. However the combat and exploration was a chore, and by the end of the game I used the console to skip battles more often than not. And the story, though interesting at first, ended as a strung along series of references to various cosmic horror properties until you reach the ending, which promptly throws out anything you have done the entire game. I understand that cosmic horror is about the vastness and futility of existence and all, but I just felt like I spent 12 hours to then get slapped in the face. Nothing I did helped anything, and my entire party suffered beyond all comprehension. What a miserable experience. Save your time and money and hit yourself in stomach a few times while wondering of our place in the universe, that is probably a better time than this game.

Story and gameplay are very good early on, but fall off in the middle. Maps are all tight, which forces you into having 2 front liners, other 4 with bow/magic. It works well early on when you have up to around 3 allies, but later on you are forced into one team composition. Magic is weak until very late into the game. Thief class is useless later on, as most enemies are immune to backstab... Classes are not balanced in my opinion. Story is very railroaded, you have a few dialogue options but nothing really changes. This game has no replayability, i imagine my second playthrough would be the same as my first one, except maybe I would get one extra line of dialogue for passing healing test if i chose to max that. Honestly, if this game ended half way, at chapter 3, I would be much happier. I would leave it a positive review. But I wanted to see the ending after getting hooked on it, so I struggled through terrible later chapters, just to be disappointed by the boss fight and ending. This game was probably made by a small team/solo dev who had wind in their sails in the beginning, made an amazing game, but had too many ideas (faction system... ship mechanic...) that end up not being used much and it kind of fell apart after half way point, when they rushed to finish it. If you are considering buying it - uninstall after chapter 2. You will appreciate it much more.

It's a really fun game. It's obviously inspired by older crpgs. There's a few ways to complete quests, but i don't think they give enough variety to need a second playthrough. On normal the combat is fun, but nor super well balanced; end game fights are too easy. The game is also a bit on the short side. you can easily beat the main and all side quests in under 20h on a first playthrough.

A wonderful RPG set in a fantasy world full of cosmic horror with tons of gross otherwordly eldritch descriptions and events. The writing is extremely good and disturbing & the story is quite intriguing. The game also has a lot of accessibility, including customizable difficulty, if you're not a hardcore RPG person and just want to immerse yourself in the narrative. The deep ones beckon.... will you accept their call?

I enjoyed the game, I love the old school RPG look and feel. The story was fairly weak. Having read all of HP Lovecraft's works I appreciate all the references, but the game feels like a long string of Lovecraft references stitched together. Some of which are plot relevant, others are pointless red herrings that will leave you wondering if you missed a plot thread. You didn't. There doesn't appear to be anything new to experience with additional playthroughs other than trying out different classes. Even so I look forward to giving some other classes a try in a second playthrough.

Great atmosphere and the story is well-written, but combat and exploring are such a slog that it ends up making the game unfun.

Skald is an ode to old school RPGs such as the ultima series and manages to succeed at reproducing those nostalgic feelings that I haven't felt in a very long time. The world is coherent, forboding, and very successfully leans into the lovecraftian theme. Some enemies and bosses are legitimately unnerving and horrifying. Combat is very fun and rewarding without feeling too difficult. I am used to playing this sort of RPG so I started off on Hard mode. While the prologue and very beginning of the game felt punishing for certain builds, later on in the game it felt much more balanced. At least in my opinion the hard difficulty feels very well tuned, challenging in some parts but in no way unfair. I definitely think I would have found the game too easy on normal difficulty. Another overall pro for the game is the fact that there is a mod tool which allows you to create your own modded campaign/levels which I am honestly really looking forward to. There is a lot of content considering the affordable price, especially if you get into mods. The story and writing is overall quite strong, enough so to make me feel sucked into the world. Characters you meet feel like a natural part of the world, and exploration is very fun. At first I was worried that there was no map scrolling feature, but the maps are small enough that you never get lost so it was never an issue. I really liked how one of the major quests had a clever solution to avoid combat altogether and it felt very satisfying to pull off. The writing does have some issues, though. There are a noticeable amount of obvious typos and general lack of editing (i.e. using the word greedily two sentences right next to each other) which makes it feel like a first draft. There are also a handful of quest interactions that irritated me a bit. For example, there are some quests where it feels like you're pestering the npc for a reward after you went way out of your way to do something good for them. If you don't request anything then they literally say "thanks" and move on. This wouldn't feel as bad if taking the moral high ground by not asking for a reward left you another in game benefit, but it doesn't. In some cases it even feels dirty to ask for a reward because for example at one point you go on a quest to [spoiler] find medicine for a dying child. When you complete the quest, the mother offers to compensate you by giving you *the only thing she has* which is a necklace that is worth barely any money. When you refuse the necklace, nothing happens. [/spoiler] While in some ways I enjoyed that this added to the world building with how harsh the game is, it would be nice if some quests felt better to complete. Quests did feel rewarding *overall*, but cases like this felt out of place. Character creation and leveling is really satisfying overall, but one downside is your characters get pigeonholed into a narrow set of skill progression so the decisions you make feel more or less permanent. As far as skills go, you can *somewhat* mitigate poor skills by finding magical necklaces, rings, etc. There is however no way to increase major attributes beyond high level character unlocks, powerful magical items, and an optional side quest later in the game. Another minor gripe is the resting system. There's very little benefit to save resources by only consuming half the required food for camp because you do NOT gain based on the amount you are missing. Let me give an example. Suppose half of your party which is extremely low on health and the other half that is at half health. If you consume half resources, then the party members that are dying will go up to half health but the rest of the party members that already have half health or more will gain nothing. This isn't really a big deal in the long run because resources are not scarce, but on principle the system does not seem well designed in my opinion. There were two significant bugs that impacted my experience a little bit. The first one is a targeting bug where sometimes I had a character performing a ranged attack that was unable to target a certain character. This happened regardless of line of sight, so this lead to rare instances where I had a character that was forced to skip a turn. It wasn't a huge deal but definitely annoying. The second bug happened while exploring the area of Firgol. It was a fairly major bug but luckily I was able to fix it with a brief visit to the forums. Here's a description of the bug and how to fix it: [spoiler] At the end of the Carnivale quest in Firgol, you can get locked inside the manor because the trigger to end the quest and unlock the manor (interacting with the throne inside the manor) fails to register. This is also associated with a steam achievement. Luckily I was able to find a command to complete the quest, unlock the manor, and successfully get the achievement by opening TAB and then entering the following command: {completeAndRewardQuest|QUE_TheCarnivale3} Make sure you use curly braces, and make sure you use a vertical bar at the end of Quest. [/spoiler] ***EDIT***: I think my biggest gripe with Skald is that there were SO many underutilized mechanics in combat. Many status effects in particular saw almost no use. I can barely remember at any point in the game being affected by: insanity, charm, sleep, deafness, silence, or confusion and as such there seemed to be no point at all to grandmaster mind magic and other spells you can get that alleviate these conditions. It was also frustrating that spells which remove magical buffs felt useless because there were so few encounters where enemies ended up buffing themselves. I also never encountered enemies that could turn themself invisible so I saw no use for the spell to remove invisibility. Maybe this was because I killed enemy casters so quickly, but my point is that I kept expecting spells like this to have strategic value but none of them ever saw the light of day. The distribution of different damage types also feels very out of balance. There were 7 spells implemented to cause fire damage, only ONE spell to cause electric damage, and the only way to cause acid damage with magic was indirectly through Earth summon spells. There was also no magic school that could cause cold damage at ALL (nor did I find weapons to cause cold damage?) so finding enemies with cold vulnerability felt bizarre since I never found a weapon or ability to cause it. There were Fire, Earth, and Air schools of magic, so why not introduce a Water school to implement cold damage that way? The combat system was still a lot of fun but the underutilization of elemental damage and status effects made it feel incomplete when you look at the bigger picture. Maybe this could be some encouragement for things to get addressed through mods? ;) These issues aside, It's a challenging and rewarding ode to old school rpgs, the only thing it really lacks is polish in some areas. I feel like if I had to give SKALD an overall rating it would be something like an 80/100.

(Follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42150626-Jarl%2527s-Game-Treasury/]my curator[/url] for more reviews like this) Skald is a solid CRPG inspired by 1980s to early 90s classics. It features turn based combat on a tactical grid, overworld exploration ala Ultima, and a handful of quests that can be approached in different ways. What it does, it does well, but my only disappointment was with its length. It's very short for a game of this type, and I finished it after only 16 hours. When you think you finished the first major area of the game and expect the world to open up, you've actually passed the halfway point already and the game becomes far more linear and sparsely populated afterwards. Apart from the disappointing second half, the game was quite excellent though. And really, any game whose biggest flaw is that there wasn't enough of it should be recommended. The highlight is definitely the city occupied by sinister cultists, which offers several approaches to solve its main quest. Exploring the island is highly enjoyable too - at some point you get a ship to explore other islands, but sadly there's not too much to discover there apart from one or two locations. The combat is solid, rewarding tactical maneuvers on a grid like the classic Gold Box games. Skald has a few interesting systems, like two health bars: the first represents a character's endurance and when it's depleted, every hit inflicts a wound which can only be healed by resting (or leveling up, which fully heals up the character). This makes protecting characters with low health a priority, to prevent them from getting hit on their second health bar, while also encouraging focusing on wounded enemies to further reduce their combat effectiveness by inflicting debuffing wounds. While there are a couple of useful magic spells, I found myself using them rarely. Buffs and debuffs were the ones I used the most, as well as healing, while damage spells felt underwhelming compared to the damage output of fighters and thieves. Oh, the thieves - this game has the most overpowered thief class I've ever seen in an RPG. Thanks to the backstab feat, they can do insane amounts of damage that almost insta-kill every enemy up to the late game. Flanking an enemy usually adds a bonus to hit and damage, but thieves do additional backstab damage to any flanked enemy, which is ridiculously high. For comparison, when my strongest fighter would do 20-40 damage per hit, the thief's backstab did 130. No other source of damage compares. For most of the game, my tactics revolved around pinning enemies with my defensive melee characters, and then moving the thief in to finish them off with a single hit. Despite the lack of balance, the fights were fun and engaging. Especially early on the combat is challenging and requires good tactics to survive. You can only rest where it's safe to do so, and healing potions are rare in the early game, so there's quite some resource management and attrition to consider. While the combat is solid, the game's real strength is in the writing. Skald combines a traditional medieval fantasy setting with a plot of Lovecraftian horror. There are weird tentacle creatures, sentient fungi, dreaming gods, characters losing their sanity, all the classic tropes. There's even one quest in a particular town which essentially retells a particular classic cosmic horror tale... if you know your mythos, you will be able to predict 90% of that quest's events from the moment you hear a certain woman sing a few lines of a song while gazing out across the shore. The plot doesn't do anything new, many of its elements feel very familiar if you've read Lovecraft and other authors around him. But the sheer quality of the writing is impressive, genuinely one of the most well-written RPGs I've played in years. The prose is excellent, far far above what you'd usually expect from a computer game. If game awards had any meaning, this would have won best writing of 2024, but we all know these awards aren't really about quality. Another high point is the soundtrack, from the catchy menu theme to the more somber atmospheric pieces playing deep down in the crypts. I may be a little biased since I'm friends with the composer, but he did put out a couple of bangers for this one. The music and visuals work together to create a dense atmosphere, and the game is very immersive despite its low-resolution graphics. The artstyle fits very well to the Lovecraftian themes of the game, reinforcing the vibe of dread it establishes. Overall, a very enjoyable traditional RPG with excellent writing and great atmosphere, although its second half feels a little rushed and I was disappointed at how quickly it was over. Can't help but feel like there's a bit of wasted potential in here - just a few more locations, a few more quests towards the endgame, and it would have felt more well-rounded. Even so, I can fully recommend it to any fans of oldschool RPGs, to enjoyers of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, or simply to people who want some actual good writing in their computer games.