An interesting blend of a dark fantasy RPG, an extraction shooter, and auto-battler, bundled into a short, simple, but tight game that took me about 3 hours to 100% and roll credits. And that in ofitself was something that was quite surprising. While most would associate an extraction shooter to be a game where you endlessly grind and go through maps and build your stash and go through changing seasons battling other players. Skills & Raids decides to not do that.
I didn't have to grind once. I didn't really have to re-do areas if I didn't want to after finishing the quests. I never felt pressed by the difficulty enough that I needed to excessivly go through an area to get materials. The drop rates felt good and it made the progression through each quest and area feel fine. Even if I didn't have the highest grade gear, it never felt like I needed to. One could say the game was easy in that way, and sure I didn't wipe once, or really see any characters die on my way to the boss, but there were quite a few close calls, and that's owing to the auto-battling aspect of the game.
The game's combat is basically watching and praying that your characters are kitted out enough but, there is also a manual component owing to each character in your 3 member party having 2 skills. The game is also designed around a classic RPG party, so you have a tank, with skills revolving around protection, a back liner that has healing skills and a vanguard with attack oriented abilities. Each area (out of 4) provides skill drops for each character. And there's no restriction you can have on each character despite there being clear synergy baked into the areas. As such, by the end of the game I had a comp running both freeze and static status effects. So while the auto-battling was happening, I could rotate my freeze skills and then subsequently paralyze. Its not mechanically intensive in that way, but there is some degree of customization that can make combat feel more intense and require attention, especially as the enemies themselves garner more mechanics in each area, having limited healing and protection because of cooldowns, etc. There were some geniuinely tense moments where I almost wiped due to overestimating how I built my squad. Unfortuantely the gear system is more linear then that. You just build gear and there's no special status to provide more customization. But in a way I almost felt that worked for the, again quite short and simple experience, especially because the game railroads you through the area as one might in a more traditional RPG.
The game does feature a narrative by the quest giver. And I did find the overall world and atmosphere quite nice. It's a world that's enveloped by this aura of forgetfullness that's created from a larger entity that you have to slay. The game is flavoured around it, you don't use MP, but "memory" to cast skills, you don't drop items, you "forget" them, and the quest giver provides a good amount of detail that helps build that overarching dreary atmosphere of a world that seems steeped to be doomed to always cling onto the idea of memory. While its told in plain narration and not through scenes or with any accompanying visual aid it was cool to see, and I appreciated having that element to tie things together. And it made the railroad process to the final boss coherent in design. You're helping this NPC gather material, craft items for you, and they slowly start to remember details about what to do while guiding you across the world through contiuously dangerous areas until you finally hit the boss. I mean it works for the kind of experience the game wants you to have, which is a contained, linear, narrative extraction rpg one. Which is a set of words that I don't often see put together, but, it was quite fun here.
