Upon first loading the game, the most striking feature will likely be the graphic style. Skald employs 8-bit graphics and a 16-color palette, with gorgeous pixel graphics comprising both tilesets and numerous visuals of various scenes and characters. Extensive dithering creates detail and depth within this constrained visual style and adds a grittiness befitting the atmosphere.
The second-most striking feature will likely be the controls, which are downright bizarre. Many menus require toggling through options rather than just navigating with a stick or d-pad. You can definitely get acclimated to the control scheme as you play the game, but they take some getting used to.
The game operates on a square grid from an almost top-down view, like most traditional 2D RPGs. Your party is represented by one character, and there are separate screens for the overworld and specific locations. Battles take place in a separate instance of specific locations where all party members appear.
You play as a mercenary who has been sent to an archipelago where strange happenings have been reported in order to rescue your childhood friend, who you know has mysterious powers. However, your ship is attacked by a monstrous beast as you approach the shore, leaving you with almost no resources for your quest. As you attempt to orient yourself, you discover that things are seriously wrong on the island, which seems to be careening towards a dark fate, with your friend potentially at the center of it all…
The game is a breeze to navigate and control. Pretty much all you need to do is move around the 2D grid. Rather than having a separate interact button, you interact with the environment simply by moving into whatever you want to interact with. It’s a small thing, but being able to navigate the entire exploration portion of the game with just the control stick was actually pretty nice.
The RPG system is a bit like modified D&D. You have five primary stats, which are used to determine most of your other stats. There are abilities (each of which is keyed to a stat), which you can put points in. When attempting a challenge, you roll dice (specifically two six-diced dice, not a d20), add the applicable modifier, and check it against the target difficulty to see if you succeed or fail.
Many events require a skill check, and while only one party member can make the check you can freely swap your “lead” party member during events, so you can always use your best modifier. The dice are then rolled right in the window! Although sometimes it is simply a flat check of whether you have a sufficiently high modifier in the skill, which can be a highly restricting factor at the beginning of the game and trivial at the end. Because the system is built on 2d6 rolls, which have a bell curve, as opposed to a single d20, which has a flat distribution, you can rely on easy rolls much more reliably.
Battle takes place on the grid, in Skald’s unique system. Like D&D, at the beginning of battle each character will roll for initiative to determine order. At base, on each character’s turn they can move three squares and take one action. However, while most games allow you to switch up the order you do things in, you can’t move after taking an action in Skald. There are also opportunity attacks if a character leaves a square an enemy is threatening, and this counts as an action that ends the turn.
While there is a certain amount of depth once you have a critical mass of characters and resources, battles are brutal and simple at the beginning. You start off with only one NPC companion, who is a rogue and therefore relies on sneak attack, which is most frequently triggered by flanking. However, when you only have two characters and very low mobility (remember that trying to move around an enemy will trigger an opportunity attack, which is awful as it both gives the enemy an extra attack and deprives you of your attack for the turn), it is that much harder to proc.
Once you have some upgrades, the game gets much more manageable. More characters means it’s easier to create a formation where the enemy is off-guard. The only ranged weapon are bows, and arrows are in short supply early game, but once you have a stockpile you can use them whenever appropriate. Some classes also have skills that improve mobility, helping on that front.
There is a system for magic which, like old school D&D, starts off weak but scales hard. The issue at the beginning of the game is that your spells are weak and you don’t have much attunement (mana). Attunement thankfully scales up faster than attunement costs, meaning you can sling plenty of spells once your spellcasters are built up. There is also a mechanic called “cascade” which is basically a chance to be able to cast an additional spell for the turn each time you cast a spell. This helps spellcasters’ action economy, but the issue is that the primary constraint of spellcasters isn’t actions but attunement, so cascading rarely felt like it gave a significant boost.
Many characters can also learn combat maneuvers, which are free but gated by cooldowns. The thing that’s weird about combat maneuvers is that they all share the same cooldown (for one character). So in many RPGs you want to learn multiple strong skills in order to form a rotation, but in Skald you can’t. Unlocking new skills is often one of the most fun parts of an RPG system, but Skald encourages you to only learn one or two combat maneuvers per character, since use of maneuvers is so limited (and so points are better spent on passive boosts that will always be active).
Defense is also a bit different than in D&D. In D&D only the attacker rolls to hit while the defender has a static armor class, but in Skald both the attacker and defender roll, each applying their applicable stat, adding to more variance. Additionally, Skald has a stat known as “soak”: whenever you take damage, the amount is reduced by a random amount up to your soak value (to a minimum of 1). This lets you choose two avenues for defense: you can pump your dodge, to try to avoid ever getting hit but taking full damage when you do, or max soak, so that you consistently get hit but usually for smaller bits of damage. The fact that soak can just not proc made it feel like it wasn’t worth it, but it probably would have been more palatable if I had simply thought of it as every 2 points of soak reducing 1 point of damage per hit on average. (There’s also the fact that armor with high soak would usually also have high encumbrance, reducing the stats of the character that wore it.)
Each character essentially has two health bars: vitality and wounds. Once vitality has been depleted, you receive an injury debuff and begin to take wound damage. Once your wounds have been depleted, you are knocked out (if you’re a player character) or die (if you’re an enemy). Vitality can be recovered relatively easily with magic and potions, but wounds and injuries can only be recovered by resting. (If your vitality is depleted, healed, and depleted again you’ll receive a second injury, so once your vitality has been depleted it’s very difficult to continue adventuring.)
Resting can be done in beds and the overworld, but each party member must eat 10 units of food in order to heal and recover attunement. Additionally, each party member can select an activity to do during resting, which requires a skill check that provides a small bonus if successful. One activity is foraging, which provides 10 units of food if successful, making the rest free. Food is limited (early) and there is a cooking system that allows you to combine individual ingredients into meals that count as more food than the sum of their parts, but foraging every rest obviates the need for diving too deeply into that system, and the perks of the other rest activities aren’t large enough to make foregoing them feel significant.
However, characters with injuries can’t perform rest activities. This means you need to spend the 10 food units on them, which is why you always want to adventure as much as you can without getting wound damage before resting. However, early game you often don’t have enough of a vitality buffer to defeat enemies before at least one of your character gains an injury, compounding the limited resource issue. (The only benefit is that since you don’t have a full party, the per-rest food cost is relatively low.)
Each character has a class, which determines the equipment they can wear as well as their skill trees. (Despite the name of the game, there is no “Skald” class, but fortunately Pathfinder fixes this.) Skills are organized into tiers and groups. Each time you level up, you get 3 skill points. Most groups can have a maximum of 6 skill points put in, and grant a skill after putting in 1, 3, and 6 skill points. This means you can get the first two skills from one level-up, and the capstone skill from another level up. Putting points into a skill group also requires at least 1 skill point in the prior skill group as well as a minimum level requirement based on the tier. Because most skill groups give something for 1 skill point, just going down the tree can provide a lot of buffs and skills.
You can view the entire skill tree from the start, which can help planning a character, although at the beginning of the game you often won’t understand what’s important. Not realizing that all maneuvers share the same cooldown can especially distort skill evaluation at first. Level-ups arrive at a decent pace throughout the entire campaign, and you get enough skill points to get basically everything worthwhile by the end. There were even some characters where I effectively ran out of skills to spend points on, since the only skills left were for weapon types that character wasn’t using.
The classes also did not seem entirely balanced. Basically, the way the system’s math works, you need some sort of steroid in order to continue to deal damage in the mid- and late-game. The best steroid in the game is the rogue’s backstab… but some enemies are immune, which causes battles to crawl to a halt. Other characters were able to keep up decent damage with boosts, but then classes without any boosts (like my cleric) couldn’t do much but serve as meatshields by the end of the game. (My custom character was a tank that was dealing minimal damage lategame, so the premade party members have enough damage on their own, at least.)
The battle system and limited resources make the early game truly feel like a fight to survive. You’ve been stranded alone in a faraway land, with eerie creatures crawling up in the night to attack you. Skald nails the atmosphere of survival in a dark and gritty fantasy world. The scenario is crafted like a tough but fair old-school TTRPG scenario: sometimes you need to make tough choices, sometimes between two NPCs and sometimes between you and them. Sometimes being selfless rewards you, while other times people simply accept your altruism and you get nothing in return. It’s up to you to decide what to do and how to act.
I generally tried to be kind and selfless, even in the face of the overwhelming darkness… except the game made thievery too appealing to resist. Considering every other resource in the game is constrained, it’s probably no coincidence that gold is hard to come by as well. But there is also a stealing mechanic: each merchant has a “suspicion” level, which determines the prices at which they buy and sell goods (with worse prices the more suspicious they are). The suspicion level also serves as the difficulty level to steal items. Each item you steal increases the difficulty level, usually only by 1 but sometimes by more.
Suspicion often starts extremely low, and some items are worth lots of gold. The economics are too good to pass up. Once you reach mid-game, you can probably trivially steal from a single merchant goods worth more gold than you get over the course of the entire campaign. Are you really going to pass up stealing thousands of gold worth of items when you’ve just barely managed to scrap together a couple hundred? (If your answer is yes then… good for you, I suppose.) If you are caught stealing the merchant just stops doing business with you, which is barely a downside since there are plenty of merchants in the game and you’ve presumably already stolen most if not all of what you want from the merchant anyway.
While the game is good, the amount of depth in the system is limited. Like I said, I eventually reached a point where there weren’t even any more skills I wanted. While combat gets much smoother after the first few levels, it also eventually reaches the point where it becomes a bit of a chore, especially against backstab-immune enemies. Fortunately, the game understands this and knows not to overstay its welcome.
The first island of the game is by far the most well-developed one and the most interesting part of the game. The scenario designers clearly understood that once you finished the first item, your characters would already be fairly developed, and they realistically only had a certain number of hours left in which they could provide content before the game would begin to drag. I don’t want to spoil what happens, but I thought they did a fantastic job resetting the pace and expanding the game world without becoming too overburdened.
That being said, just like the beginning of the game is a stumbling block, I think the end is too. It’s a downer. While a perfect happy ending with no complications whatsoever would be tonally inconsistent, Skald’s ending is incredibly dark, so prepare yourself for that. “Skald” is really the name of the system and engine, with “Against the Black Priory” being the scenario. You can create and play other player-created scenarios within the “Skald” engine, but after finishing “Against the Black Priory” I had had my fill of the system. (I hadn’t had too much—but I had no desire for any more, especially in scenarios that would likely be not nearly as polished or well-made.)
As I already discussed, the game uses 8-bit pixel art to great effect, with wonderful tilesets and incredible graphics created within the self-imposed constraints. The music is chiptunes, with consistent themes providing an overarching mood of an oppressive but magnificent journey.
Skald engenders a feeling of true discovery and adventure, never knowing what sort of twisted scene you’ll run into or evil you’ll need to vanquish next. There are plants and materials throughout the game that you can collect, and moving next to them will highlight them. Many of these plants blend nicely into the background, but as you play the game you’ll learn to recognize them—which feels like you actually getting better at learning to recognize valuable and useful plants within the island’s ecosystem.
Despite the retro presentation (and weird controls), Skald does not blindly abide to outdated design philosophies for the mere sake of doing so, making sure to include modern conveniences as well. For instance, many in-game terms will be highlighted (related to both lore and mechanics), and clicking it will bring up a window with more information. This glossary entry can have highlighted terms too, allowing for multiple layers of windows. This makes it easier to learn and keep track of the game’s story and worldbuilding. On top of that, the combat log will often just display simple information like whether an attack hit and the amount of damage, but you can click the entry to get detailed information, like the applicable modifiers and if any special effects were applied. This makes full battle information available as needed without clogging the combat log with irrelevant details. (How much we have improved from Baldur’s Gate!)
Skald is clearly a labor of love, putting a modern old-school spin on the CRPG genre with a wonderful Lovecraftian campaign. While Skald isn’t the massive epic like other CRPGs, that just fits the tale—of unimportant specks trying to resist and fight against something so much greater—all the more. The game is the perfect length, letting you fully explore the game systems without getting too overbearing. The first few levels will be particularly tough, but like most games based around a constraint of recourses, the experience massively smooths out after the intro. And then the end is depressing, so prepare yourself. But if a dark turn-based CRPG with enough depth to require thought but not so much that you need to spend hours researching builds and micro-managing battles is what you’re looking for, then Skald will deliver a perfect performance.
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