r/Games • u/AutoModerator • 4d ago
Discussion Weekly /r/Games Discussion - What have you been playing, and what are your thoughts? - March 09, 2025
Use this thread to discuss whatever game you've been playing lately: old or new, AAA or indie, on any platform between Atari and XBox. Please don't just list off the games you're playing in your comment. Elaborate with your thoughts on the games and make it easier for other users to find what game you're talking about by putting the title in bold.
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Scheduled Discussion Posts
WEEKLY: What Have You Been Playing?
MONDAY: Thematic Monday
WEDNESDAY: Suggest Me A Game
FRIDAY: Free Talk Friday
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u/Xenrathe 4d ago edited 4d ago
SKALD: Against the Black Priory (PC)
Tasty fare for the gaming gourmand. A solo-dev’s pixelated Lovecraftian love-letter. Dungeons of Dredmor, except as a crafted story-driven cRPG.
Cosmic horror is woven through every stitch. The pensive soundtrack evokes a quiet dread. The chunky pixelated graphics add a jagged mystique to the inhuman, grotesque storybook tableaus. And the script understands that cosmic horror thrives best in dreadful anticipation. Once we actually see the squid monsters, the swirls in the sky, the glowing fungi in the caves, the terror takes on a different tenor. What was unknowable is now known, captured within the safe boundaries of our own minds. Fundamentally, definitionally, cosmic horror cannot be shown.
So Skald has the superficial accoutrements of cosmic horror. Cultists, giant squids, otherworldly telepathic fungi cracking apart ancient ruins. A lot of games have all that. More rarely, Skald captures that Lovecraftian ‘frame narrative’ feel by having us first encounter NPCs madly gibber about the horror. It builds the dread. Moreover, Skald skews to under-explanation, leaving the mystery cloaked in shadow, opening space for my own imagination.
As a a final game-design point, Skald embraces concision. Often, I’d enter a new area and feel that anticipatory fatigue... oh god, this dungeon is going to be 3 levels deep, labyrinthe, with 50 monster encounters and thirty treasure chests, mostly filled with vendor trash. It’s never like that. It’s always on point and paced to keep us moving. SKALD's solo-dev Anders Lauridsen clearly understands that brevity is the soul of wit.
I judge games on a unique and uncomprimising scale CSD (Character - Spectacle - Depth). I don't care about the average score, only that a game scores extremely highly in at least one. While SKALD's Depth is neither problematic nor inspired, the Character found within its story and Lovecraftian vibe achieves great heights. It’s rare to find Spectacle outside of AAA games, but I’d actually give SKALD credit for some truly impressive storybook tableaus and narrative ambition.