Skald: Against the Black Priory is without question the retro-est game I have played. The recent spate of boomer shooters and PS1-era survival horrors are mere whippersnappers in this 8-bit RPGs eyes, cosplay Roman soldiers marching under the shadows of its artificially ancient Pyramids. High North Studios dark fantasy adventure is a devoted recreation of role-playing from the primordial days of home computing. If it threw back much further, you’d need to visit a university to play it.
Skald: Against the Black Priory reviewDeveloper: High North Studios ASPublisher: Raw FuryPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam, GOG)
Skald is a good game. I want to say that up front and unambiguously. It’s a tightly crafted, moodily written RPG that makes atmospheric use of its Commodore 64 aesthetic. But it also had me questioning the value of digging up this part of the past, as Skald’s self-imposed restrictions make it tough to recommend in a genre that has burned so brightly in recent years.
We’ll get to that in time. For now, there’s a ship to wreck. Skald’s adventure kicks off in enjoyably immediate fashion, with the vessel your character is travelling on being bisected by some giant, betentacled sea monster. As you drift down into the abyss, the story flashes back to the journey’s inciting event; an aristocratic former friend of your father’s asks you to find his daughter – a woman named Embla – who has absconded to the Outer Isles for reasons unknown. Then the abyss spits you back out onto the shores of one of these islands, where it soon becomes apparent that Strange Happenings are afoot.
Skald’s Sword & Sorcery tale communicates like a knife in the dark, straight to the point and nasty as hell. As your bedraggled character hops across the pebbly coast, you battle ship rats and scuttling crabs horribly mutated by some unseen force, and pass the smashed corpses of sailors pulped by the roiling tide. The first NPC you encounter is a haggard old hermit who makes his living by picking clean the bodies of ill-fated seamen. The first side-quest you receive involves descending into the well of an elderly farmwoman to retrieve the bones of her children.