Skjoldur Story

Think original NES Zelda gameplay meets NES Kirby power absorption, colors, and environment. The world is a nice large landscape to explore with some troll-y vibes in there (at least the minimap fast travel helps minimize that.) Solving the numerous puzzles felt rewarding after scratching your head for quite a bit. The bosses were my biggest draw. I find it refreshing not having to spam attack to defeat something by mashing a button as fast as you can while they have an opening. They are all like a puzzle in themselves and man does that boss music get stuck in your head. The mini-games are an adorable change of pace to a surprisingly stressful world of baddies (okay still a lil' stressful, lookin' at you penguin ball.) Controls feel a little clumsy at first, but once you realize it's more like a 4-directional NES game and you learn to just be patient and block, it all fits into place. Ultimately, it feels like an homage to days gone past of loading up your NES, blowing on a cartridg...

Great music, love the art, game play is solid. Overall everything seems to really work well together. Its challenging but rewarding, which is a combination present in any game worth playing.

The cute ascetic belies how challenging this game is. But that makes it all the more rewarding when to accomplish something. Take your time with this game instead of just trying to smash your way though everything and you'll have a wonderful time.

My first game that I remember playing through was Link to the Past on my SNES, so I figured this game would be right up my alley (and it was!). Like it's predecessors it is top-down, but non-linear so you aren't beholden to a specific order of dungeons or biomes. I will say, though, that similar to games of old this is no walk in the park. You're probably going to die a bit, but that's OK - failure is how you learn. Graphics are colorful and 'cute', a nice contrast to everything that can kill you. :) It's not too long of a commitment, and the dungeons are great original ideas that don't just rehash other games' ideas. I would definitely recommend picking this one up. P.S. Did I mention you can ride animals? Cause you can ride animals.

Fun and lighthearted, but offers a challenge. There is a little bit of puzzle solving, I get the sense it will get more difficult as the game progresses. The shield mechanic takes a bit to get used to and the lack of hand-holding from the game probably caused me to be on the starting island a bit longer than would be average. All in all, I am having fun so far!

This is a fun little non-linear Zelda-like. The visuals are charming with plenty of cute characters, enemies to boop, and scenery to check out. The neat twist is the shield, which you use to absorb enemies abilities. It allows for some neat combat tricks and puzzle solving moments. If you like games with charm, exploration, and puzzles, you should check it out!

Recommended with one major caveat. Music's okay, story's whatever, I liked the art, the nonlinear world design is great, achievements are mostly fair, and a lot of the mechanics used are quite innovative and creative. Most of the puzzles were quite nice, but I'm saying most here because two of the mechanics stand out as AWFUL- the stupid barrel shuffle minigame and the final boss. The barrel shuffle minigame has the barrels move so fast by the second game that keeping track of them is genuinely hard... but that'd be fine even if it means that we'd lose if we blinked at the wrong time if there wasn't the issue with it being shuffled north to south, where most of a column can move up or down and conceal the movement of other barrels, meaning that it's very easy to lose track of the original barrel... and instead of being able to try again immediately, you have to keep on hitting barrels until you die from the bombs or get lucky, and if you die you're sent back to the start of the area...

a few glitches - game has crashed several times at key points not enough variety in music difficulty isn't scaled well there is a lot of randomness in boss fights, particularly the final boss lots of good ideas that needed more development pretty good game overall. i've enjoyed everything except this final boss fight

controls are cluncky