Indie Game of the Week 474: Skald: Against the Black Priory

Many Indie games are throwbacks that deal heavily in nostalgia, while still being effective enough at what they do to stand alone as quality games, but very few take me right back to the inception of my love of video games quite like Skald. Skald: Against the Black Priory is a traditional turn-based CRPG with a bespoke ruleset somewhat reminiscent of classic AD&D, albeit with the sort of streamlining that would make sense for a video game with a modest budget to think about, and sees the player-named protagonist sail to the accursed island of Idra to rescue the wayward (and fey-touched) daughter of their deceased father's old employer. Shipwrecked just off the coast after a kraken attack, the player has to scrounge together some equipment (and allies) before they can head further inland and start solving the mysteries behind the girl's current location, why she bolted in the first place, and why this island happens to be crawling with bizarre monsters.

Skald's quick to dump both a lot of lore and a lot of systems on you early on: while there are certainly quality-of-life concessions to be found during the character creation process, such as eliminating encumbrance or healing after every battle, it's otherwise more about throwing you in the deep end and letting you feel your way around until you have a handle on things, perhaps making a few mistakes along the way. The combat system is very reminiscent of SSI's "Gold Box" series of D&D games, such as Pools of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds, in how it uses grids to keep track of everyone and careful positioning of your party members is often key to mitigating the amount of harm the often large groups of enemies can do to your team, especially the spellcasters at the back. Characters and enemies act in an order based on their initiative (faster types tend to act first, but not always) and the player has a certain number of turn points that can be spent on movement, spells, item usage, and physical attacks: the last of these always automatically ends their turn, unless they're of a high enough level to attack multiple times. Relatively straightforward but with plenty of allowance for deeper systems as it goes along, such as status effects (this already feels Call of Cthulhu-y enough to have a lot of those) and other conditional modifiers.

Dang ol' bat party up in here. Best strategy I've found is to stick to a wall so they can't surround you. Good for healers to be within touching range of their buds, too. For healing and moral support both.

Outside of combat there's considerations like light sources (helpful for spotting containers in dark conditions), stealth (where you might want to turn your light source off), lockpicking, lore checks, and diplomacy. You'll typically cycle your leader to whomever has the best skills for whichever checks are needed, and with six character slots it seems like it wouldn't be hard to have an expert for every occasion. Of course, you have to find and recruit that many first (like with the older Baldur's Gate duo and the more recent Pillars of Eternity games, you can either recruit fully fleshed-out NPCs with plenty of dialogue and roleplaying opportunities, or else create a bespoke party of mutes). It's a format I'm all too familiar with in my many years playing CRPGs: the darkness-based fog of war effect and the necessity of light sources also calls to mind more strategic games like the original X-COM Enemy Unknown or Shadowlands or Lords of Chaos, where I'm constantly kept on my toes by the foes I can't see as often as the ones I can.

Visually the game's gone for this suitably murky 8-bit visual style that's big on dithering and resembles a RPG made in the late '80s. Kind of a similar vibe to what Loop Hero or Darkest Dungeon were doing, if not quite as stylized, and while the appearance of certain environmental objects and enemies are so low-pixel to be fairly abstract in their rendering, it's still an effective aesthetic for the sort of audience it's courting with the game's deliberate old-school vibe. It all belies some pretty modern gameplay conceits, from the accessibility options I mentioned to the way the game is generous towards injuries (it uses a similar system to Pillars of Eternity where losing too much of your easily healed HP can incur "wounds", which is where you start seeing serious repercussions; it's kind of like blasting through a character's shields to get at their less-easily-restored health in other games like Mass Effect or Divinity: Original Sin 2). The spell system runs off mana which recovers quickly outside of battle, characters can rest to heal most damage but only if they have sufficient food (and hunger is another survival option you can toggle off for a less intense playthrough if desired), and the feat system is a set of class-based skilltrees that tend to offer a lot of passive boosts to dicerolls as much as they unlock new abilities to use. It's conventional in the way modern games tend to be, though it creates an odd juxtaposition to its Gold Box-aping style—where you'll usually want the manual open next to you while playing—that feels like it should far more harsh and unapologetic about its complexity.

So this turned out to be a bad idea. One of the constellations looked back at me, and I got struck with a Fearful status effect for my troubles. I don't know what challenge rating a cosmic space horror might be but I suspect I'm not equipped for it.

I'll admit to not having got too far into the game yet, with only two recruited characters and having only just made it out of the intro and extended flashback into the thrust of the early game's troubles, but it seems very much my kind of thing so far with enough smart modernization touches to not feel like I'm constantly wrestling with its systems and encounters to make any semblance of progress. I rolled a cleric-like Hierophant for my protagonist because the first two recruitable characters are front-liners who'll need buffs and heals, but I'm intrigued by the magic system and the relatively less stressful approach it takes by moving away from the classic D&D Vancian systems where my hoarder mindset ensures that I hold onto every spell charge "until I need it" (which just makes things way harder than they need to be) so I'm hoping to find a few mages for the group eventually. I've no doubt that this is the kind of game to really start turning the screws once I'm past this halcyon period, even while I'm already getting my butt kicked by giant crabs, so hopefully I can meet that challenge once it arrives. Either way, it feels like it's been forever since I've played an RPG like this and so I'm inclined to keep with it for now. (As always, I'll come back with a post-game post-script in the comments below if anything major changes in my impressions of the game.)

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

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