It was announced as coming soon three years ago. But no other release, no.

You're probably thinking of the demo.

You can't make games in 2D any more. You have to make them in 3D and then use inverse GPU-deceleration. The game is actually running in 3D at 1080p in the background, then being down-scaled to pixel resolution and projected onto a flat 2D image.

/s

Anyway, I haven't tried it, but the game looks really cool!

It's actually true, 2D games still use GPU acceleration. As I mentioned above, even the 2D engine in Godot still uses polygons, and OpenGL or Vulkan. The game is indeed technically running in 3D, but also as I mentioned, at 480x270 and then upscaled to the desktop resolution. Most pixel art games run at the native resolution but upscale the sprites, that way they can have a mix of pixel resolutions, which allows things such as a few games that have the option to have either pixel fonts or regular fonts. But Skald appears to run everything at its chosen "native" resolution.

Lol!

When you try to be funny, but then realize your joke is not-a-joke ... :,-(

I know it was a joke.... I figured it would still be worth elaborating on how things work.

Modern GPUs work in such a way that you can program them to work in a 2D manner.

In short, all that you do with a GPU is the following:
* Send vertices to the GPU. Each vertex can have an arbitrary number of components (can even be 0).
* Run the vertices through a vertex shader. For 3D, this would typically involve some sort of matrix or quaternion transformation. The output is groups of 3 coordinates.
* Triangles will be rendered by the GPU.
* The fragment shader will then run through each pixel that's part of a triangle. In 3D, usually these involve indexing into a texture, then perhaps applying some lighting or other effects.

You can then do 2D just by how you program them:
* The vertices can have only 2 coordinates, x and y. No need to send z to the vertex shader (unless you want to control what renders in front of other things; this is similar to how layers work on 2D game consoles).
* The vertex shader can then convert from, say, world coordinates to display coordinates, while just using the same z value. (Or, again, z can be used to simulate layers.) At this point, it doesn't feel like a 3D projection in the usual sense.
* The fragment shader can then do a texture lookup. Or, you could have it look up a tile in the tilemap and render that pixel as appropriate.

There's also compute shaders. With compute shaders, you could just do your own 2D rendering into a texture, then only use the graphics pipeline to render just that texture onto the full screen, hardcoding a full screen triangle into the vertex shader.

(Note that this post is based on OpenGL, but the same thing can be done with other sufficiently modern graphics API. From what I understand, in something like Vulkan, the main differences are command queues and having to deal with GPU memory more explicitly; in particular, passing the vertex coordinates is more cumbersome, so hardcoding a full screen triangle makes more sense.)

I just found out this was made in Norway. Always cool to see.

It might be too much to ask developers to actually try to solve why their game is not working on some customer's old OS/hardware/driver combination, but they could try to find some midway between official support and total denial of any possible compatibility with any older OS, like telling us if they know of any old OS/hardware/driver combinations that they know to have been able to run their games and how confident they are that they can keep their games from becoming incompatible with Windows 7 for example, preferably making a distinction between the single player and multiplayer compatibility when necessary, as there are far more better reasons to eventually start using a newer, incompatible version of some third party libraries with the latter than with the former.

Norway has some nice sights but also way too much water
On the other end some areas have far too little water

Some of the map design is likely reflected by the developers heritage. Reminiscent of a Baltic island with Norweign geography: highly mountainous islands whose shores are heavily shaped by deep fjords (the landscape is even referred to as a fjord on one occasion); inhabited by hostile, sea-faring, barbaric people who fight with fury in a frenzy, that could be analogous to how a foreigner may see the Vikings of old. I've beaten the game now, so if you wanted to know something about it, perhaps I could be of assisstance.

Was about to ask if it's that short or you really pushed it, but now that I checked HLTB... 3.5h? That's very underwhelming of a RPG...

There are two entries for this game on HLTB. One for the prologue (the demo) and one for the complete title, which states 15 hours for completion. It took be a little longer than this because I was doing things other than playing the game whilst it was open. Depending on the how the players familiarity with the genre, 15-25 hours for a first time playthrough seems about right. The price tag reflects the game length, after all. It's an RPG created by one developer, not a double or triple A title where one might expect thrice that game length.

Indeed, the 3,5h seems to be the Prologue/demo version.

Maybe I am a slow player but I am at the beginning of the full game second chapter and I have marked more than 11h for now.

The HLTB is just an overall guide. In my experience it use to be always longer times