SKALD: Against the Black Priory Preview - Page 3
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The skill system exists in a fairly limited state at the moment, but already it neatly leverages the game's digital nature not constrained by any physical dice. In SKALD, your skill level is used as the ceiling for a roll against some target number. Let's say you want to pick a lock with the difficulty of 10. Your lockpicking skill is 15. This gives you some room to hit the target number. But if your lockpicking is at 9, you're out of luck.
Things get more interesting when you have an opposing roll, like when you're trying to influence some NPC. There, your diplomacy skill is rolled against the NPCs, so theoretically, if you have diplomacy of 11 and the NPC has 15, you can still get lucky. However, right now, skill usage is fairly inconsistent, because, at one point, the game allowed me to try my luck against an NPC in this fashion, but during a different conversation it straight up didn't even let me roll with the same skill discrepancy.
I'm sure this is the kind of thing that will get ironed out during the upcoming early access phase, though. Already, the game can boast some neat features you wouldn't necessarily expect from a pre-EA project, like a working day-night cycle and the very impressive light and shadow system stemming from it.
Overall though, while clearly unfinished, the game is already really fun to play. It has that tough to pin down sense of adventure in spades, and I can't wait for it to get more content and a few extra layers of polish.
Technical Information
For an early build, the Prologue is already very stable. I haven't encountered any major bugs or crashes, and the worst thing about it is the occasional typo.
You can already save and load the game at will, and you get an autosave slot too, but currently, save slots are a bit broken and refuse to get overwritten.
The game also manages to avoid the plight of many a retro project that look like they were made back in the day, but run like a poorly optimized modern mess. In fact, I was quite surprised to see SKALD not only run really well but also be very modest with its resource usage.
One very annoying thing right now is the fact you can't change the game's resolution. You can choose to play in full screen or in a tiny window, and that's all. Other than that, the game looks great and pushes its pixelated visuals to the max. It even has an optional CRT mode that makes it look even more like an artifact of a lost age.
The game's UI still needs a lot of work, however. Right now, it's a bit too minimalistic for my taste, with lots of wasted space, things that look like buttons but aren't, buttons that do something, but I've no idea what, and one contextual button that's very inconsistent.
One last thing I want to mention here is a small pet peeve of mine. At times the game prompts you to press the Return key. Now here, I could feign indignation at the fact there's no such thing as a Return key, but having been stumped by this conundrum in the past, I now know that for some reason, there are those who refer to the Enter key as Return. Which is madness.
And I would've probably just grumbled to myself about this unfortunate naming convention and moved on if the game didn't also refer to the same button as Enter occasionally. And since only one of these prompts can stay, this is me making my voice heard - away with Return and all praise (press) Enter.
Conclusion
So, even though SKALD: Against the Black Priory still has a while to go before it's finished, now is a good time to ask yourself - should I be interested in this game? If you're looking for a nice RPG that can teach a lot of bigger projects a thing or two about presentation, writing, and system design, the answer is a firm yes.
But should you buy it during the early access phase? Ordinarily, the answer to this question is, "only if you want to support the developers."
However, Al, the guy behind this project, has shown time and again that he's very much open to feedback. Already, the game looks little like the humble retro throwback project it originally was. And a lot of these changes can be attributed to Al's cooperation with his backers. And if you'd like to join this merry bunch, you'll be able to do just that when the early access build goes live.
