I agree. They could just use Godot instead.

If my nightmares of being back to school would have this kind of graphics, they'd be much more fun. Now I'm trying to imagine pixel portraits of all the teachers and classmates ... ;D

Joking aside, personally I have mixed feelings about the graphics. Pictures and portraits are fine to me, maybe not beautiful, but nice enough to get me engaged. The environment on the other hand seems a bit hard to read at times. But experience tells me you shouldn't judge a game by its screenshots, and cleaner, more modern graphics don't necessarily improve games but can also ruin their atmosphere.

The graphics are amazingly done. They are what they want to be and beyond. The problem is you, believe me. And you know it.

Eh, more advanced graphics would be preferable, but I'll take primitive graphics over shitty artstyle any day of the week.

Definitely not ok with this system requirements here. :P

Is it in Unity?
Many indie devs have no resources or simply don't optimize their games...
Graphics are simple, but the engine running it, being bad optimized, ruins it for the low end pcs.

I've tested it with many indie games made in Unity:

When the dev puts in the effort, it can be really well optimized.
When they do not (or can't), even the simpliest NES graphics need 16gb Ram to run. It's crazy. haha

It's hardly the only game (see also: Tunic, Old World, Universim, Ozymandias, some more I can't remember off the top of my head). The only "Mac user" dev I can think of is Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb software. The plain truth is, Mac versions typically sell more, that's all there is to it. You can argue about user base all you want, but in the end, Mac users are more inclined to buy stuff, plus Wine on Linux is perceived to be good enough now that devs are content to limit their Linux support to "doesn't have any major errors running under Wine". The reason GOG doesn't make Galaxy for Linux isn't spite, you know; it's a business decision.

Godot doesn't have inherently better performance. If anything it's a little behind. I'd suggest using Godot over Unity, but not because of performance.

There are plenty of Unity games, 2D and 3D, where nobody complains about performance. The engine isn't really the biggest issue when it comes to that; after all it's not that hard to find Unreal games that are overly demanding of hardware. Devs are perfectly capable of being bad at optimizing games written for any engine.

On that note, users on discord have reported that the game works fine on Linux with Proton+SteamDeck (the full game) and Wine (the demo at the very least.) The developer in the past (2021) suggested that he was considering a dedicated Linux build, but as pointed out above, it is likely towards the bottom of a very long to-do list, considering the functional work-around.

Those graphics look absolutely terrible to me. I'm not sure why this game is apparently popular on GOG.

The other day I was criticizing the Whispers In The Moss game for also have terrible graphics, and Skald's graphics appear to be almost as bad.

I'm also not sure why deliberately making new games with terrible graphics is a fad or a trend. None of that makes any sense to me. I cannot fathom why people would want to buy such games either.

I'm also not sure why nearly unreadable, very-uncomfortable-to-read, ultra-pixelated, text like appears in the screenshots and videos for this Skald game, is considered to be a "desirable" feature.

On a positive note, I respect the devs for including Galaxy Achievements.

Because the graphics are not terrible, but you're apparently too self-centered to understand that others have a different opinion about them. It's readable, and there are different font options (all pixelated though). Note that for some reason the GOG screenshots have corruption in the text that makes things look kind of bad when in fact they are not. Look at the Steam screenshots instead.

Of course I agree. It's really hard as an indie dev to spend time and resources most times they don't have optmizing their games. That's why I also stated:

It's completely understandable and also a reason why many indie games made in Unity are badly optimized.

I don't know the implications for performance, but Godot actually has a true 2D engine, as opposed to Unity "faking" it by running everything in a 3D engine.

There are some people who like those older, simpler, styles of graphics. Like me, for example.

In the end it's all still textures on polygons drawn by a GPU. The "true" 2D engine is really just semantics as to how you interact with it as a programmer, so it's still "faked" compared to retro computers where you were directly drawing pixels. It's also incorrect that everything in Unity is in a 3D engine, as it does have an entirely separate 2D physics engine that has no interaction with 3D physics. (Not that you'd use any kind of physics engine with a tile-based RPG.)

For many games I'd still generally recommend Godot over Unity for various reasons, but it doesn't have any inherent speed advantage. It can have a size advantage, since for pure 2D games you can disable the 3D engine in builds, although it doesn't actually save that much space.

Everyone who calls this graphics "ugly" or "terrible", etc., clearly shows their age - or rather: their lack thereof.

It looks like an interesting game.
This reminds me of those old classic RPGs...