Every part 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 preserve 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 isn’t.
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 essential quest to fulfil (on this case finding a childhood good friend who’s mysteriously gone lacking). However all just isn’t nicely right here on Idra—a curse has befallen the island, reworking the wildlife into monsters and infecting the individuals 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 abnormal—I am not new to being a stage 1-5 adventurer, I’ve fought big rats, indignant crabs, and bandits earlier than. However every part’s subtly improper. The rats aren’t simply big, they’re taking over human-like traits—I get real chills once I meet their writhing, monstrous queen and uncover she will speak. 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—however it seems they have been abnormal 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 conventional top-down view is reassuringly easy and unassuming, moments of discovery are marked with immediately hyper-detailed pixel-art—a visible shock to go together with the transient but horrific descriptions. I am reminded of one other retro throwback, brilliantly creepy point-and-click sport The Excavation of Hobb’s Barrow, which pulled the same trick, contrasting intervals of quiet puzzle-solving with sudden grotesque close-ups. However in that sport the people horror ambiance was at all times there, protecting you perpetually on edge. Skald as a substitute offers you simply sufficient RPG busywork to maintain you subtly distracted. After an hour of tinkering with my expertise tree, sorting by 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 totally different headspace than a horror sport usually would—one which lets it preserve shocking me with how darkish and unusual it is able to get.
What’s essential is that it does 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 related video games you may usually see a extra horror-tinged strategy 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 normal D&D get together that is stumbled right into a nightmare fully unawares.
It is actually received me hooked. Each human sacrifice, malevolent fungus, and idol of an elder god I uncover makes me increasingly 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 turn into out there on Steam at this time.
