Every thing about Skald: Towards the Black Priory feels crafted to lull me right into a false sense of safety. With its splendidly garish retro RPG visuals, acquainted lessons and character choices, and easy turn-based fight, I maintain being lured into considering I am simply on a typical fantasy journey. That solely makes it all of the extra disturbing once I’m reminded that it is not.
The sport begins with a really well-worn RPG trope: you are shipwrecked on an island with nothing however the garments in your again and an necessary quest to fulfil (on this case finding a childhood buddy who’s mysteriously gone lacking). However all is just not properly right here on Idra—a curse has befallen the island, remodeling the wildlife into monsters and infecting the folks with insanity and plague. I am but to find the supply of this darkness (although I’ve my suspicions), however the result’s plain: the land is suffused with Lovecraftian horror.
On the floor, nothing I have been battling appears that out of the peculiar—I am not new to being a stage 1-5 adventurer, I’ve fought large rats, offended crabs, and bandits earlier than. However every little thing’s subtly improper. The rats aren’t simply large, they’re taking over human-like traits—I get real chills once I meet their writhing, monstrous queen and uncover she will be able to discuss. The crabs guard a hidden chamber the place inscrutable experiments have been carried out impossibly far within the historical previous—I declare a knife there that the native lighthouse keeper is so afraid of he begs me to destroy it. The bandits are crazed and fanatical, murdering and sacrificing everybody they’ll discover—but it surely seems they have been peculiar fishermen earlier than this all began. Have been they pushed insane, or have been they at all times secretly in league with darkish gods of the ocean?
The place the traditional top-down view is reassuringly easy and unassuming, moments of discovery are marked with out of the blue hyper-detailed pixel-art—a visible shock to go together with the temporary but horrific descriptions. I am reminded of one other retro throwback, brilliantly creepy point-and-click recreation The Excavation of Hobb’s Barrow, which pulled an analogous trick, contrasting durations of quiet puzzle-solving with sudden grotesque close-ups. However in that recreation the folks horror ambiance was at all times there, protecting you perpetually on edge. Skald as a substitute provides you simply sufficient RPG busywork to maintain you subtly distracted. After an hour of tinkering with my expertise tree, sorting by way of my gear, gathering greens to cook dinner into a night meal, and taking over easy sidequests, I virtually drop into RPG auto-pilot. I do not imply that it is boring or rote, simply that it simply places me in a very completely different headspace than a horror recreation usually would—one which lets it maintain stunning me with how darkish and unusual it is able to get.
What’s essential is that it would not let the horror bleed into any of these core mechanics. Your characters have by no means seen something like this earlier than, and the world they grew up in was sane and regular—they’ve typical fantasy lessons, they cook dinner soups and pies and brew therapeutic potions, they forged spells with names like Barkskin and Bear’s Energy. In different comparable video games you may typically see a extra horror-tinged method to the character choices, maybe letting you begin as an Occultist with unusual powers of their very own—that units a tone, however there’s one thing so efficient right here about feeling like a regular D&D occasion that is stumbled right into a nightmare utterly unawares.
It is definitely received me hooked. Each human sacrifice, malevolent fungus, and idol of an elder god I uncover makes me an increasing number of intrigued to see how deep this rabbit gap goes—and what number of extra instances Skald can take me abruptly. If you can also’t assist however examine that which is able to inevitably drive you mad, the sport’s simply grow to be accessible on Steam as we speak.
