You feel the tug of an unseen hand, pulling you toward something. What that something is, you are unsure. The one thing you do know is that it is immensely powerful—powerful enough to control the creatures of the sea, powerful enough to drive men mad. It calls to you, draws you in, compels you. As the darkness hangs over you and you reflect on the things you have seen, the things you can never unsee, you feel a hollowness inside yourself. You feel empty, as you have always known it would end this way, and you are powerless to stop it.
Hiding behind its 8-bit aesthetic, SKALD: Against the Black Priory from High North Studios AS is a dive into darkness, madness, and Lovecraftian horror. It is a retro-inspired fantasy roleplaying game. In this turn-based game, you start as a simple mercenary on a mission that is dear to you. You venture to the Outer Isles, where you must understand how the isles have been plunged into chaos. After a brief prologue, you wake up on the beach with nothing but a few rags after your ship wrecked, leaving you stranded. The isle of Idra is flush with madmen and mutated creatures who will attempt to rip you to shreds with reckless abandon.
While the systems are straightforward, they add an additional texture to the game. When resting, you won’t recover your health fully unless you have enough food to feed your party. This makes it really difficult to rest after every battle to ensure that you are at full health, as you will simply run out of food quickly. The game also has a crafting system that encourages exploration; putting items into the stove or alchemy lab will yield new recipes if you get them right. Personally, I found this amount of trial and error frustrating and disengaged from it quickly, relying on found and purchased food for the duration of the game. The puzzles in the game are fairly simple. Only one of them got me stuck for any notable length, and even then, I simply hadn’t picked the correct dialog option to make use of the puzzle solution, which I had primed earlier in the dungeon. The puzzles provide enough variance from the combat to make them enjoyable, though. Combat is difficult, and if a party member is downed, there is a chance your other party members will become panicked and unable to act for multiple rounds. Losing a single party member can cascade quickly into a full wipe. This means you should be exhausting every option you have to keep your party members alive, and even then, it will prove difficult.
The story is quite linear. While you do control where to go and can choose to engage with side-quests, it feels like you have very little agency in the outcome of the game. This is an apt feeling for the Lovecraftian nature of the game, though. If you are looking for an RPG where you have a high level of player agency, I suspect that this is not the game for you. I did enjoy the story, though. The pacing was nice; it never felt rushed or like it was moving too slowly. As you progressed through the game, the story moved along with you.
The art style of the game lends itself nicely to the vibe of the game. The intention was to feel like a retro-RPG, including forgoing many of the quality-of-life enhancements of modern gaming. For example, there was no overland map you could pull up at a moment’s notice, and there was no fast-travel; if you wanted to get somewhere, you had to do it on foot. In my opinion, this added to the flavor of the game instead of detracting from it. You were rarely traveling so far that the overland trek felt laborious, and the world is small enough that having no map was fine once you adjusted to it. It felt like I was playing a game from yesteryear, and that is a large part of the charm.
Overall, SKALD: Against the Black Priory was an enjoyable experience, all things considered. The tone of the game is dark. The islands have been taken over by madness, and the denizens of the island act as expected. Evil and uncomfortable things are done by the NPCs in this game. While nothing is fully worthy of a trigger warning for those concerned, the tone of the game is certainly dark, and evil deeds are abundant. Recently, SKALD received an update that created mod support for the game. While I have not played with any mods, it seems that user-driven narratives are being made. I would recommend keeping an eye on that, as it may extend the shelf life of the game for much longer than originally expected. I would recommend playing SKALD, but would not say it’s a must-play. If you are looking for a quality 10-20 hours of RPG gameplay, this will be a great addition to your collection.
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