Two Flavors of Retro RPGs: Scarmonde VS. SKALD: Against the Black Priory
Totally by chance, I had my eye on two indie pixel-art call-back RPGs this year. First was Scarmonde, which I played and enjoyed the demo of during a NextFest earlier this year. Second was SKALD: Against the Black Priory, which was brought to my attention via a post by Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster. Due to the chance confluence of the Autumn Steam Sale and a publisher Humble Bundle, I also played them right next to each other.
I've spoken before on the somewhat arbitrary differences between western and eastern RPGs, and these two are fun to place side-by-side because they're both intentional throwbacks to a time where the proverbial branches were closer together than I think of them as these days. I found them to be oddly similar.
(Spoilers for both games to follow if that was not clear)
There's a great quote from Brian Eno that gets passed around regularly:
"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided."
As throwback/retro-style games start to creep towards console generations that have more complex graphics and the market becomes more and more saturated, having a striking aesthetic is probably more important than ever. Pixel art as a whole is getting more impressive by the day, but that just sort of causes an animation arms race that leads to stuff like Sea of Stars where the highly polished graphics are almost the game's only redeeming quality. Yet I still bought the game, didn't I? I admit it, I'm superficial; something might have the greatest story ever told in a video game, but if it looks like Stock Standard RPG Maker, I'll probably just skip it entirely.
Thankfully, Scarmonde stands out visually by channeling the aesthetic of NES Final Fantasy games (1-3), making use of stark blacks and limited palettes. The look immediately evokes the limitations born of a device with 2 KB of RAM. I couldn't tell you if it actually limits itself to the specs of the NES, but it sells the 8-bit style better than most. My understanding is that most of the sprites and tiles are commercially available assets sold for use in RPG Maker, and man, I gotta check out some of those if there's stuff that looks this good out there.
SKALD's Steam page specifically notes inspiration from the Commodore 64, which is before my time (and despite my posturing of pushing older games I have not actually gone back to classics like Wizardry or UItima). My immediate point of comparison - again, despite not having played them - is the catalogue of D&D Gold Box games, which have a similar tile-based system with the occasional bespoke image. The dithered aesthetic of early-90s home computers is striking even today; you don't get PC Engine screenshot bots for nothing.
Perhaps more important than the visuals themselves are what the visuals represent. By suggesting the graphical limitations of older hardware, they're priming your brain to accept the other limitations and keep your expectations in check (and pleasantly surprise you whenever a modern QoL thing pops up). Scarmonde naturally isn't going to have bespoke animations for every attack or individual weapon. Of course SKALD isn't going to have a 90-hour plot with strongholds and factions and choice and consequence; look at it! This ain't Baldur's Gate 2! You're gonna hop around on that grid and you're gonna like it!
You must gather your party before venturing forth
Pretty much all video game RPGs broadly trace back to D&D in one way or another, and figuring out exactly what kind of role you're going to play is accordingly important in both SKALD and Scarmonde. Both plop you straight into character creation right upon hitting New Game.
These days, I tend to associate JRPGs with having a cadre of bespoke party members filling specific roles and western RPGs with giving you a blank slate protagonist and a large degree of customization. This was less true back in the era these games are hearkening to. Dragon Quest 3 - enjoying a recent HD-2D remake - is the quintessential JRPG, and it uses generic party members recruited en masse according to the player's whims.
Westward-wise, the whole "companion" thing was broadly codified by Black Isle's Fallout and Bioware's Baldur's Gate, the latter of which has something like two dozen characters to cover a broad spectrum of class and alignment combinations depending on how you choose to play. They only really started being narratively important after some cross-pollination. Bioware's former creative director James Ohlen cites Final Fantasy VII as the reason he pushed for more complex character writing in Baldur's Gate 2, a statement that some western game devs these days would probably shoot themselves before saying.
With this context, Scarmonde's start is more what I associate with RPGs of the late 80s to early 90s. There is a plot of sorts, but it's mostly told in the background as your squad of nameless adventurers delves ever deeper. The Steam copy specifically calls out how the game is for players who don't want "thick layers of story and dialogue bogging them down". You assemble your entire party from nameless class archetypes in the fashion of Final Fantasy I.
I ended up going with a Paladin (physical/tank/healer), Sage (nuker/healer), Thief (physical/debuffs), and Bard (flex/buffs). It worked well enough, though especially by the end of the game I felt like I could have used a second beefy tank character. Dame Kay the Paladin did a great job drawing aggro to be sure, but one person eating four party member's worth of attacks drops a lot faster than I thought.
SKALD's character creation comes with a familiar set of classes that are analogues to D&D, down to being sorted into the classic adventuring party roles. You got your fighters, mages, thieves, clerics, with at least two sub-options per category. Every tabletop GM I've met (including myself) has said out loud that it doesn't really matter if there's class overlap in the party, but every tabletop party I've ever been in has gone to lengths to avoid overlap. SKALD's squad sports a sizeable six slots suitable for spreading skills and specializations.
I expected SKALD to also be a game where you build out the entire party from scratch. I was quickly proven wrong. You make your protagonist (and there are a scattering of generic, moldable "mercenaries" throughout the game), but eventually your party will be filled with bespoke, pre-written companions. Roland will always be a crusty old Armsmaster and Kat a neurotic Thief. The five of them cover pretty much all the bases on their own, relieving most of the pressure on having an "optimal" protagonist. I played an Officer, due to previous CRPG experience instilling me with the idea that the protagonist is always the party face.
Even though you pick your own class and such, the game opens with a flashback prologue that establishes your character's backstory and place in the world. Even better, you usually get between 1-3 options that let you pick how your character feels about said backstory even though they don't materially affect the plot. It's nothing nearly as complex as Tyranny's Conquest system, but I was pleasantly surprised.
In enduring, grow strong
SKALD's progression is also pretty standard D&D-adjacent. Each level (intended to cap around 20, though you can grind past that) awards skill points that you put into your class tree, which allows for minor flexibility in what to focus on. Is your Thief specializing in melee or ranged? Is your magos pursuing Earth or Fire magic? They're still gonna do what they do either way. I spent much of the game abusing the Thief's hugely-damaging Backstab, only to slam into a brick wall once crit-immune slimes and undead became more common in the endgame. My Hospitaller (Cleric) was specced for support and melee, not holy damage.
Scarmonde has a more complex system. It's got the usual "level up and your stats go up" business, and then something that reminded me of FFX's Sphere Grid. Each class has its own menu of unlockable abilities, plus a list of generic upgrades accessible to everyone. They all cost magic orbs, which are shared among the entire party; if you decide the Paladin needs the Aggro+100% skill, that's costing the same orbs that you need to learn the party-wide heal or the Sage's multi-target wind spell.
This has more - as Sakurai would call it - "game essence". You're always weighing what skill you need next on a broad scale based on a multitude of factors. In SKALD, the named characters all cover each other's weaknesses, so you only really have to make this kind of judgement call on the individual unit scale rather than as a full party.
The thing is, then, you're always short on orbs. I was scrounging and scraping the entire game trying to save up for the expensive "extra turn" ability, probably making the game way harder by limiting my kit to such an extent. Why spend 30 Lv2 orbs on this mid tier spell when I could spend them on the big spell later? Once you're in the home stretch the game drops an absurd number of the damn things; I filled out like the back 50-60% of my abilities in the last 20% of the game. I wish it was spread out a little more, but I suppose I have only myself to blame.
Meanwhile, in SKALD's faux-D&D system, the main problem was trying to keep a full party of six equipped with decent items. Does Kat or Ifen get the nice magic bow that does lightning damage? Who can eat the extra encumbrance of full plate? The game is surprisingly light on solid loot, with only a handful of bespoke magic items. Instead you're stuck dealing with merchants the whole game as if you're perpetually some fucking level 1 dirt farmer. Vendors refresh their inventory every seven days to keep with your level curve, but their wares are completely random. I specced Roland into big two-handed greataxes because I snagged a decent one early... and it was the only magical two-handed greataxe I found the entire game.
Equipment is less of a problem in Scarmonde, yet also way more important, especially as you start to get the crazier effects in the back half. Most of the time, you can reasonably keep around old equipment that's numerically worse for their side benefits. There's simple things like various element-absorbing shields saving my ass, but there's also shit like axes what boost your aggro by 200% while also adding 50% counter chance, 10% damage recovery, and making your counterattack multi-target. The staff that casts a random status spell instead of physical attack was critical in the last few areas, letting me quickly test which enemies were or weren't susceptible to which effects (way more than I thought are vulnerable to statuses that actively trivialize encounters).
This kind of mechanical minutiae is Scarmonde's purported raison d'être. As noted, the Steam copy is, if not quite outright contemptuous, then at least dismissive of the concept of a narrative. But Dungeon Encounters this ain't; there are a decent number of NPCs in notable locations and you're certainly expected to go back and talk to folks at the hub periodically. There is a story there, despite everything.
Like story in a porn movie
Scarmonde's starting setup is perfectly fine for what the game's trying to be. The eponymous capital-d Dungeon was formed by the Dragon God in antiquity with three great treasures scattered within. Adventurers flock to its eldritch depths in hope of claiming the treasures and gaining the power to grant their wish and/or remake the world. Get to it.
RPG Maker is made to emulate the specific systemic quirks of JRPGs and JRPGs were made the way they were due to the limitations of console hardware and the correlating target audience. They ended up with a greater focus on narrative setpieces and operatic storylines, aka the aforementioned "thick layers of story and dialogue" that Scarmonde seeks to cut away. It is, then, darkly humorous to me that when Scarmonde does include text, it comes out thicker and denser than nearly any JRPG that inspired it, and not in a good way.
Laura Michet wrote a fun post recently about playing some Game Boy games for the first time where she notes the hardware is fundamentally at odds with displaying large amounts of text. Space limitations on third and fourth generation console games forced dialogue to be economical. At the worst of times it's perfunctory and pallid, at best it's poetic and punchy. Even a purely narrative focused game like Ace Attorney (originally a GBA game, remember) barely has room for three lines per text box, and they're rarely filled to capacity.
Scarmonde's dialogue fills out the entire text box pretty much every single time with no regard to anything as mundane as line breaks. There's no rhythm. Be prepared for multiple paragraphs of characters you barely know monologuing about their motives for 10 boxes because you only meet and talk them once every 5 hours. If dialogue in this kind of game is supposedly fat to be trimmed, why include it in great big globs rather than judiciously marbled throughout?
This is the fourth text box you get from talking to the first NPC in the game.
Meanwhile, SKALD's dialogue operates in the CRPG tradition, full of evocative description and straight up telling-you-what-to-feel in imitation of a Dungeon Master. The text box grows and shrinks in proportion to how many paragraphs need to be on the screen, which allows it to stay small when it's time to display an appropriate splash image of some horrible monstrosity or another. However, the game lacks any kind of conversation log or history, which I consider a huge oversight in something with this much text.
Y'all like eldritch dark fantasy? SKALD is about the most standard you can get. Your protagonist is hired by a local lord to find his missing daughter, whom is also your childhood friend. You are shipwrecked on the "Outer Isles" and in the process of fulfilling your mission you come across towns with dark secrets and ancient conspiracies and cosmic horrors. The hits.
I praise the game's bespoke companions, but they aren't the type you can sit down and talk to about their feelings and goals. This is an era before the proliferation of concepts like reputation points, remember? They mostly just chime in from time to time to comment on the situation in grand "well I'm a wizard and that looks fucked up" tradition, and one plot-critical companion in particular will do so regardless of whether they're in the active lineup.
None of it is terribly deep, but it works with the vibes, and both these games operate almost purely on vibes. Just from a resource standpoint, they simply can't be "fully fledged" examples in the genre, but each makes clever choices in evoking the qualities that make them feel big and impressive.
Doing a lot with a little
Scarmonde is built in RPG Maker, which enforces a relatively narrow mechanical framework of equipment, spells, and good ol' grid-based maps. I'm curious about RPG Maker myself and I've enjoyed weird outliers like Final Profit, so I do not find this to be a problem. Frankly, I'm an easy mark for the kinds of tricks the game pulls.
When I think back to playing RPGs on the SNES as a kid, the thing that first drew me to them was the sense of scale. There's that specific feeling of exploring a whole castle town, then you walk outside and the camera zooms out so far that the entire town is as small as you. Even if the world is mostly empty space, the illusion of a grand scale persists.
Scarmonde pulls this trick like three damn times and I was hootin' and hollerin' each time. The layout of the dungeon obviously makes no physical sense; you keep going down past several floors of mazes and caves and then inevitably open a door to reveal a whole overworld map with multiple dungeons to itself. It's a chance to take a breath and then set out in whatever direction you will. It's not holding your hand about it, either; I walked right past the fucking airship in the final overworld and only went back post-credits because I saw I missed an achievement with a higher completion rate than the one for beating the game.
This format also means the game can be balanced via broad checkpoints of power rather than across specific dungeons and story beats. It's an admirably canny use of resources for a small-scale project. In many ways (and this is praise), Scarmonde feels like a less ambitious version of Crystal Project, another story-light, FF-inspired indie RPG with a big focus on the inherent pull of exploring unknown locales.
SKALD also has a JRPG-like overworld, but shows its scale in the opposite way: with the density of its smaller zones. Baldur's Gate 1 might tap into that sense of exploration I mentioned, but that's not what I think of with CRPGs; my first was Planescape: Torment, which takes place almost entirely in one city. Instead of walking out into a huge open space, I think of walking into a crowded town where every street has someone with a different quest for me.
The game isn't necessarily jam-packed with quests, but what is there is nicely intertwined/nested and often features multiple outcomes. I'm not trawling through this city's gross, labyrinthine sewers just to sneak into one of the three Reaver camps, I'm also looking for lighthouse oil for the dude across the bay, trying to find eldritch fungus for the creepy apothecary, and searching for the missing smuggler captain who might be my only ticket off the island.
Alas, this breadth narrows quite a bit in the back half of the game, to the point where the third town is completely empty except for a guy pointing you towards the dungeon. I suppose when you've already played the people-driven-mad-by-cosmic-secrets card multiple times, the only thing left is to see what the big deal is so we can wrap things up.
You've played one, you've played them all
Consider this the final warning for spoilers: I gotta say that I didn't expect both SKALD and Scarmonde to follow such similar story beats. Maybe there's something in the water among indie devs, or maybe I'm stretching to keep these two tied together. Either way, I wouldn't have written this post if not for these specific narrative devices.
Both games end with descending deep into the bowels of the earth and discovering a science-fiction-coded area (Scarmonde's got Tron Lines along the ground, SKALD just goes for the ship from Alien) in what has up to now been a world of swords and sorcery. Frankly, these days I'd be more surprised if I saw a fantasy game that didn't pull this "twist".
SKALD drops hints all game long that you're in some kind of eldritch eternal recursion. The entire party gives their lives to awaken/empower the Sleeper, some kind of ancient precursor being and the source of all magic, as the magical barrier keeping reality from being torn apart by chaos is moments away from being breached. Happy endings for none, as the best case scenario is that the cycle repeats and cosmic horrors are merely held at bay another few millennia or what have you. I think? It's honestly fairly unclear, and again, mostly running on vibes... which I suppose is par for the cosmic horror genre.
Meanwhile, as you've been delving deeper into the bizarre and nonsensical depths of Scarmonde's eponymous dungeon, that game's veil starts slipping. Familiar NPCs become increasingly manic and unhinged. The hub town slowly depopulates, degenerating into a burnt-out ghost town populated by restless spirits. They beg you to free them from their torment by slaying the ancient magi who created Scarmonde.
Being the main player characters in a JRPG, you do so, but surprise! When the baddies said in their villainous speech that they achieved immortality, they meant it. Scarmonde is a death trap, a magical dimension one can enter but never leave, that simply drains the life force of all those within to sustain the remnants of the ancient empire. Fighting them directly simply means you got farther than most on your futile journey. The game ends panning over the restored hub town, as yet more unaware adventurers arrive to lay claim to the Dragon God's Treasures.
We've all seen endless recursion before, it's a common enough plot device (and there's nothing wrong with that at all). Video games are just inherently suited to time loops and replays due to saving and loading and such. Hell, Dark Souls is one of the most popular and influential games of the past 15 years and that shit's all about whether you keep the cycle going or let it fade. Plus both SKALD and Scarmonde are relatively short and have a solid breadth of build possibilities, so you get the free metatext of multiple playthroughs bolstering the whole recursion thing (not that I'm likely to replay either any time soon, as RPGs still have not beaten the allegations of having really tedious final stretches).
Was November/December 2024 the best or worst time to play these back-to-back? I also feel like I'm stuck in an endless cycle, futilely trying to survive in a cruel universe designed to drain us of our vital essence to empower itself. It often feels like the best we can do is simply keep afloat, with drowning as the only offered alternative. I'm exhausted. You're probably exhausted. I'm at least slightly suspicious of anyone who feels like the world's going great right now.
And as I think about these things, so begin the mental spirals. Why was I playing these games to begin with? What was I hoping to get out of them? Am I willing to admit just how big the proverbial slice of the why-I-play-games pie is "number go up dopamine good"? Couldn't I have come up with a more cohesive, "important" thesis for this post that'd get me linked in a roundup instead of scrambling for some kind of shoehorned meaning at the very end of what is basically a regular review? Am I just posturing as if my words have any value, as critics/writers I consider more skilled and intelligent than I are themselves caught adrift? (no, I'm a genius)
Dunno. Maybe sometimes it's fine to just play a damn video game without thinking about it too hard. And, without thinking about it too hard, I'd say both SKALD and Scarmonde are easily worth your time and money.
---