SKALD: Against the Black Priory
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1609100/Skald_Against_the_Black_Priory__the_Prologue
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1712620/SKALD_Against_the_Black_Priory_Original_Soundtrack_Vol_I/
You drag yourself from the black tides, across the corpses of drowned men, and onto the unwelcoming, craggy shoreline. Gulls cry overhead and the stink of seaweed fills your nose. By some miracle you have made it to Idra. It will take all your skill to survive and unravel the eldritch mysteries of the Black Priory. Pray your sanity holds.
About the Game
‘Skald: Against the Black Priory’ is an old-school roleplaying game that combines modern design and a fully realised narrative with authentic 8-bit looks and charms.
Delve into a dark fantasy world, full of tragic heroes, violent deaths and Lovecraftian, cosmic horror. Explore an engaging, branching story mixed with rich exploration and crunchy, tactical, turn-based combat that will seem familiar yet innovative to RPG fans, old and new.
Do you have what it takes to lead a company of broken heroes from the tainted shores of Idra to the gates of the Black Priory - and beyond?
Features
Lovingly crafted retro-style art:
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Experience a richly illustrated world of authentic pixel art using thousands of hand-drawn tiles and images
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A palette inspired by the legendary Commodore 64 computer.
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Optional CRT filter for that authentic old-school experience.
Deep character creation:
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Build your main character and recruit a party from among a dozen diverse characters, each with their own skill-set, agenda and personality.
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Choose from a dozen classes and backgrounds as well as heaps of feats, spells and equipment as you take your party from level 1 to 20.
Crunchy tactical combat:
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Engage in challenging, fast-paced, turn- and grid-based combat.
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Play it your way, with fully customizable difficulty and feedback settings. Or hit ‘auto-resolve’, lean back, and (hopefully) watch your party cleave a bloody path through their foes.
A richly detailed, living world:
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Explore the vast expanse of Freymark and the Outer Isles and watch your actions spell doom or salvation for the region.
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Focus on the rich, branching narrative… Or live the life of a mercenary and explore varied sidequests and encounters - the plot will wait for you.
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Manage your party as you make camp, recruit hirelings, travel by land and sea, and interact with powerful factions and their visions for the world.
Become part of a fantastic community:
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Skald was made possible by crowdfunding and already has a large, passionate and welcoming community that can’t wait to meet you.
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By joining Skald’s Early Access you’ll have a direct line to the developer, get sneak peaks and give feedback on forthcoming plans and help shape the game into a modern classic.
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We will publish the powerful tools used to create the game in an effort to support and encourage modding and content creation once the game has fully launched.
The Story of Skald: A Dream Come True
Skald is the dream-project of a lone Norwegian developer, AL.
AL missed the thrill of delving into grand, immersive games such as ‘Ultima’, ‘Magic Candle’, ‘Wasteland’ and the Gold Box series. When he noticed the lack of newer roleplaying games that combined the classic (early 90s) charm with more modern game design he decided to take matters into his own hands.
AL set to work crafting the game of his dreams.
A highly successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaign with 700 backers, and a fast-growing community of passionate fans proves he made the right call.
Collaborators
Despite being a one-man company, Scape-IT has been able to collaborate with some amazingly talented people in creating SKALD:
Danny Salfield Wadeson is a UK-based writer & narrative designer who has worked on BAFTA and TGA nominated narrative games such as Roki, Backbone and Duelyst
Twitter: @MadQuills
John Henderson is an experienced fine artist and illustrator and is also a teacher of Art. Whether using dip pen, oil paint or pixels, John’s work is easily recognizable as being highly atmospheric as well as lovingly created. Having worked on many publications and indie gaming projects he is also currently busy with his own project, Wild Wood for the C64.
Twitter: @JohnHen65953721
Scott Hartill UK based artist and game designer. More interested in pixels than anything else. Currently busy developing a PS1 style survival horror in his spare time.
Twitter : @cluly
Torgeir Fjereide is a Norwegian artist and illustrator. He loves painting mythological and medieval scenes and he’ll take any excuse to paint a bearded man.
Twitter: @TheBrushOfThor
Post Horn Public Relations is a pro-bono initiative created to support talented developers.
Twitter: @horn_pr
Rachael A Edwards hails from England and spends most of her days writing fantasy novels about morally grey characters in worlds filled with mythology, corruption and magic. An avid gamer, Rachael’s love for storytelling began at a young age. She is currently working on a YA fantasy novel and is represented by Rena Rossner of The Deborah Harris Agency.
Twitter: @RachaelAWrites
MementoMoree (formerly known as Paolo Pomes) has been creating art since his late teenage years. Proficient in most types of art, from pencil & paper to highly detailed 4k textures, he’s found solace and pleasure in the retro pixel art!
Twitter: @MementoMoree
Marco Pedrana is a digital and traditional art vagrant. He started as draftsman in advertising and comics, went on in illustration, then painting, then conceptual art. He doubled back on videogame design with Aeon of Sands, creating its graphic, story, and sfx. Lately he freelances as a 3D generalist for indie game and cinema productions.
He focuses on narrative art, regardless of the medium or scope.
Twitter: @marcopedrana
Romanus Surt is the main guy at Graverobber Foundation, the developer behind Das Geisterschiff and Der Geisterturm. He does music for SKALD.
Twitter: @surt_r
Edwin Montgomery is a composer and sound designer for games, films and performance. A long-time RPG obsessive, he wrote the soundtrack for inXile’s remastered 30th anniversary version of “Wasteland”. He has created music and sounds for a variety of fantasy game worlds, including Warhammer 40,000, Game of Thrones and Neverwinter. Edwin does sound design for SKALD.
Twitter: @edwinmyshkin
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Toybox
Hundreds of packs, thousands of items. Can you collect them all?
Toybox is a Free To Play game about collecting anything and everything.
Check back daily for free packs, earn in-game currency and unlock mini-games, environments, props, and more!
1000+ Items!
With over 1000 items currently in the game, and new packs being released frequently, you’ll never get bored!
Custom Homes
Display your items, customize your personal space, and invite friends over to play and hang out!
Mini-Games
Achieving certain goals and unlocking certain items and environments will allow you to access hidden mini-games that you can play by yourself or with friends!
Community-Driven
We planned from the beginning of development to prepare for the game to be shaped and molded around what the community would like to see.
Any suggestions, comments, feedback, etc. should be redirected to our Discord, where we are active daily!
Read More: Best Party-Based RPG Collectathon Games.
Doggone Hungry
Absolute masterpiece. Insane replay value. Really excited because they just announced Doggone Hungry 2! I suggest you play through the first before the 2nd comes out. It took me three hours to finish the story as it is an extremely challenging campaign. If you get discouraged easily, or have trouble with puzzles/stealth I highly do not recommenced this game. If i had a game I could compare it to, it would be a mixture of Metal Gear Solid, and Dark Souls. Great game especially for its price.
- DDug out! Good luck to those to take this game on, it was for sure a grind for me.
– Real player with 3.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Party-Based RPG 3D Games.
F O O D 🥭 🍇 🍈 🍉 🍊 🍋 🍌 🍍 🍎 🍏 🍐 🍑 🍒 🥬 🍓 🥝 🍅 🥥 🥑 🍆 🥔 🥕 🌽 🌶️ 🥯 🥒 🥦 🥜 🌰 🍞 🥐 🥖 🥨 🥞 🧀 🍖 🍗 🥩 🥓 🍔 🍟 🍕 🌭 🥪 🌮 🌯 🥙 🥚 🧂 🍳 🥘 🍲 🥣 🥗 🍿 🥫 🍱 🍘 🍙 🍚 🍛 🍜 🥮 🍝 🍠 🍢 🍣 🍤 🍥 🍡 🥟 🥠 🥡 🍦 🍧 🍨 🍩 🍪 🧁 🎂 🍰 🥧 🍫 🍬 🍭 🍮 🍯 hmmmmmmm
♥️🐕
- Jokes aside : this game is really fun and cute :) !
– Real player with 1.1 hrs in game
Nemithia - Tale of the Legendary Saviors
Be a part of our game’s Discord Server for access to the latest updates, previews and special events.
Nemithia is a 2D RPG made in a style reminiscent to the old school RPGs from the 90s-2000s with a modern twist.
Join Leo, Max, and Fred on their journey to save Earth and their home planet of Nemithia from the Drakians and meet new friends along the way!
Note: At release, only the first chapter of the story will be available with the option to explore the map after completing it, the rest of the chapters will be released at a later date for free.
Recruit new team members
Along the journey, you’ll meet new characters and have the possibility to recruit them.
Learn and improve your spells
While exploring the map you’ll have the chance to find new spells for your team members which can be leveled up with use over time.
Level up your team
During the 1st chapter’s story, you’ll unlock the ability to train your party member’s stats by playing minigames and level them up by facing training specific characters.
Nathan Scott (@caffi_nate on twitter) for the awesome font - Abaddon
Vitaly Kuznetsov on artstation for the awesome skill/spell animations from their Unity Bundle
7soul1 on deviantart for their awesome RPG Graphics Pack
Wine Wang/lbwbwyf on artstation for the backgrounds for the fight scenes from their Unity Package
The Throne of Bernicia
This was a wonderful game (and it was totally free). The characters changed expressions that coincided with the dialogue (like smiles, closed eyes, wide-eyed looks) and you could see them immediately, just like they were real people. It had a good amount of side quests. You had choices on what your responses could be and most of the time your responses would result in different outcomes. The story was well written and the dungeons were not all the same. It was not predictable so several times I was surprised with what happened. The battles had different backgrounds. There was comedy as well as drama.
– Real player with 17.2 hrs in game
I was looking for a random Indie JRPG to play, and happened to find this one yesterday. It’s absolutely free, without ads or in game purchases!
I’ve already beaten this game. While I wish a screen with controls would have been useful, it wasn’t too difficult to figure out. Use Z to select, X for back (or menu), arrow keys to move. There are some other buttons, that are repetitive to these, but this felt the most natural. It has some typo errors, but nothing over the top. The biggest bug I encountered is that Ghosts do not give experience or gold. There is end game gold exploit, but honestly at that point it didn’t matter for me. There are also 2-4 chat screens with an error for the speaker portrait and naming.
– Real player with 13.1 hrs in game
Siege of Avalon: Anthology
Really fun CRPG, as others have stated. Setting/Atmosphere is pretty on-point for representing a desperate band of defenders in an elongated siege, which only appears to be going further downhill. There are a lot of characters to speak with, most providing backstory or supplementary lore, with a few providing quests/offering to join your party after a certain point
IMO, you really have a good feel on your characters growth. Starting out as a complete amateur you have to take on what is essentially a suicide mission, which would have ended quickly had I not acquired the heal spell & prepared in advance, that sees your character fairly rapidly gain in proficiency in order to survive the coming perils. The AI companions have quirks (looking at you mage NPC that ran into a corner :P) but they do generally provide valuable assistance in engagements which would otherwise be extremely complicated, if not impossible
– Real player with 136.6 hrs in game
Imagine my emotion when i found this jewel in the Steam Store. Let me tell you it was a wonderful surprise. Even if the game has some issues about the combat pathfinding, let me remember to you all that this game has been released in the early 2000’s. I recomend this game to everyone who loves long epic adventures with a lot of interesting characters, and days and hours of fun. This game can be played with three different styles to choose, either you can be a warrior mastering the combat skills, or a scout and specialize in stealth and archer skills or a magician dominating all kind of spells. You will also find companions along the story that you can also equip and provide with items and armor and weapons and all sort of gadgets, they will be valuable partners in your adventure. Im very happy that i found this game again 20 years later after trying it’s demo version in the early 2000’s. I was starting to loose hope about finding it again. But now that i found it here, remastered and reforged i just cant’t stop playing it. it’s very similar to Diablo II, but let me tell you, this game is a masterpiece of is time, More dialogues, more stories, the characters and merchants you will find in this game are so numerous and complex, with stories to tell, gossips, and stuff. It’s very rich in every aspect. Please allow yourselves to play this game. It’s a rare wander.
– Real player with 61.3 hrs in game
Royal Merchant
complex game that has depth and takes time to understand The developer is updating, fixing stuff, making improvements every day. He is also communicating with the players and solving problems that they identify
– Real player with 252.6 hrs in game
disclaimer; early access review; may change in the future
TL:DR at the bottom
Sometimes you don’t have a lot of money to spend on some AAA title. Sometimes, you don’t want to support greedy corporate publishers like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and the like. Sometimes you just want a game to play while listening to a podcast or something. Royal Merchants, the fourth installment in Badim’s Royal series is similar in tone to the the other two I have played (Royal Heroes and Royal Offense; haven’t played the third yet myself) in that you hire heroes to go on quests to build up a strong kingdom. The difference, however, lies in the means of achieving this goal.
– Real player with 41.3 hrs in game
Mealmates
amazing art style, addictive mini games, super cool character designs. overall a very fun game! it even became my most favorite comfort distraction 🥺💚
– Real player with 58.2 hrs in game
Do you want to play a party game without breaking friendships? Then mealmates is for you. This sequel is a direct upgrade from the first game, where you can do more than just spoil your mealmate, play minigames and give him away to be eaten. You can customize your mealmate with clothes you can find in the “neighbourhood”, cook recipes which can later be bought in the shops and unlock things by completing achievements.
The replayability is GOLD, the music is GOLD, the game itself is just GOLD.
Worth the money. Some day I will invite my friends to give this a try.
– Real player with 19.3 hrs in game