Everything about Skald: Against the Black Priory feels crafted to lull me into a false sense of security. With its wonderfully garish retro RPG visuals, familiar classes and character options, and simple turn-based combat, I keep being lured into thinking I’m just on a typical fantasy adventure. That only makes it all the more disturbing when I’m reminded that it’s not.

The game starts with a very well-worn RPG trope: you’re shipwrecked on an island with nothing but the clothes on your back and an important quest to fulfil (in this case locating a childhood friend who’s mysteriously gone missing). But all is not well here on Idra—a curse has befallen the island, transforming the wildlife into monsters and infecting the people with madness and plague. I’m yet to discover the source of this darkness (though I have my suspicions), but the result is plain: the land is suffused with Lovecraftian horror. 

On the surface, nothing I’ve been battling seems that out of the ordinary—I’m not new to being a level 1-5 adventurer, I’ve fought giant rats, angry crabs, and bandits before. But everything’s subtly wrong. The rats aren’t just giant, they’re taking on human-like traits—I get genuine chills when I meet their writhing, monstrous queen and discover she can talk. The crabs guard a hidden chamber where inscrutable experiments were conducted impossibly far in the ancient past—I claim a knife there that the local lighthouse keeper is so afraid of he begs me to destroy it. The bandits are crazed and fanatical, murdering and sacrificing everyone they can find—but it turns out they were ordinary fishermen before this all started. Were they driven insane, or were they always secretly in league with dark gods of the ocean? 

Where the normal top-down view is reassuringly simple and unassuming, moments of discovery are marked with suddenly hyper-detailed pixel-art—a visual shock to go with the brief yet horrific descriptions. I’m reminded of another retro throwback, brilliantly creepy point-and-click game The Excavation of Hobb’s Barrow, which pulled a similar trick, contrasting periods of quiet puzzle-solving with sudden grotesque close-ups. But in that game the folk horror atmosphere was always there, keeping you perpetually on edge. Skald instead gives you just enough RPG busywork to keep you subtly distracted. After an hour of tinkering with my talent tree, sorting through my equipment, gathering vegetables to cook into an evening meal, and taking on simple sidequests, I almost drop into RPG auto-pilot. I don’t mean that it’s dull or rote, just that it just puts me in a totally different headspace than a horror game normally would—one that lets it keep surprising me with how dark and strange it’s ready to get. 

What’s crucial is that it doesn’t let the horror bleed into any of those core mechanics. Your characters have never seen anything like this before, and the world they grew up in was sane and normal—they have typical fantasy classes, they cook soups and pies and brew healing potions, they cast spells with names like Barkskin and Bear’s Strength. In other similar games you’ll often see a more horror-tinged approach to the character options, perhaps letting you start as an Occultist with strange powers of their own—that sets a tone, but there’s something so effective here about feeling like a standard D&D party that’s stumbled into a nightmare completely unawares. 

Last week, UL Benchmarks released Steel Nomad, a new graphics test for 3DMark, with the ambition that it will eventually replace Time Spy Extreme as the most used benchmark for GPUs. Although I’ve been running it a fair bit of late, on a variety of different systems, I tried it briefly before launch while collating a performance analysis of Ghost of Tsushima.

Steel Nomad and Ghost of Tsushima both have superb graphics, either through a combination of the very latest rendering techniques and high-resolution assets or because the art direction is top-notch.

Abandoned locations go hand in hand with horror games where players can be isolated, vulnerable, and, if you’re anything like me, confused. So Still Wakes the Deep’s location isn’t out of the ordinary for its genre, but even still, an oil rig off the Scottish coast is a pretty sick setting for some terrifying encounters. 

“It’s not the most glamorous setting, it’s not a fantastical setting, which players like,” associate art director Laura Dodds tells me. “We also don’t tend to hear stories about working people. I guess that’s why it’s not been focused on previously, but it’s brilliant.” 

Larian Studios is moving onto not one, but two new RPGs after its uproarious success with Baldur’s Gate 3—and one of said RPGs has a codename to get all excited about: Excalibur.

In this year’s Digital Dragons conference, Larian co-founder and CEO Swen Vincke revealed the project’s working title. I wish I could tell you more about it, dear reader, but as it turns out that’s still something Swen Vincke and his team are still working on.