Skald: Against the Black Priory - Finished

I finished up Skald yesterday.

It's a fun game - well worth the ~$10 I paid for it. It's a low-res retro-style game. I found the low-res part annoying. I can't make out most of the images of gear to tell you what was what. But the text was readable enough and the gameplay solid. The run game well on my laptop and I actually left the music on the whole game. I tend to turn ambient music off right away but the music in the game is pretty charming at its best and non-annoying at its worst. The game, in generally, is a lot of fun. Better than it appeared from some of the early reviews I saw.

I hit 93% achievents in my first playthrough on Normal difficulty. Also, I went back today to an earlier save game to try a different approach in one encounter, which netted me the sole remaining Achievement left - so I have 100% achievements. Total play time was just under 25 hours, and that includes a bit of play with a new character.

It's kind of tempting to play it again on a harder mode, but probably not. It's not like it was too easy or too hard, so I didn't feel a lot of frustration and generally felt a good level of challenge.

The only bits were, as always, I ended the game with a pile of unused resources. A LOT of ingredients for potions I never found recipes for, food items without recipes to use them, lots of prepared food - days and days and days worth - that I didn't need . . . the usual. Oh, and more gold than I could spend if I played again with it in my pocket from the start. And so many potions, that despite my aggressively using them all over the place I had dozens of extras of most of the basic ones at the end. My only big issue with the game were arrows - I couldn't fletch that many, and in the end I shot off every single arrow I found and bought in the game. My two bow-centric characters at the end were in melee because I'd long since shot off every arrow I could get. I didn't expect to run totally out of ammo. If I played again, I'd aggressively buy every single arrow in the game, even the cruddy ones and overly expensive ones, so I would have ammo at the end.

But overall it's good - the story is good, the gameplay is solid, and the engine apparantly can be used for mods . . . so I find ones I like I can potentially play more games on this chassis. Time well spent.