Finding and cleansing the Sieidis (sacred stones) of the four familiar spirits grants you access to a new ability. Each of these has a secondary effect when activated while playing the drum. The Owl allows you to dash and create wind currents, the Bear can create earthen boulders and break walls, the Trout provides a shield and heals corruption, and the Fox lets you double-jump and start fires. Most of the story is framed around finding the familiar spirits, which serve as clear markers of progression as well as augmenting your abilities. Only the movement-based abilities get any significant usage, with most environmental puzzles requiring you to dash and jump around between platforms or air currents. It’s a shame that the other powers aren’t used as much but the freedom of movement gained from the Owl and Fox’s blessings is very satisfying. If you can get used to the quirky controls, it feels great to glide across the side of a mountain, reminiscent of aerial-heavy 3D platformers like A Hat In Time.

Skábma’s presentation is simply gorgeous. The landscapes are colourful and stylistic, with the lighting palette proving particularly stunning. Exiting a cave and staring out across a mountainous vista is a constant delight. Magical effects are also beautifully realised and add a sense of wonder to Áilu’s abilities. This does come at the cost of performance, with the frame rate plummeting in cutscenes and when the screen gets busy, but the tradeoff is worth it and rarely impacts gameplay. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the game’s camera, which requires constant babysitting with the right stick lest it clip into a wall and disorient you.

Similarly, some odd decisions regarding the control scheme tend to get in the way. Abilities are activated with face buttons, but you need to hold one of the bumpers to play the drum in order to activate their secondary effects. This leads to a lot of fumbling when trying to chain dashes and jumps with creating boulders to land on or wind currents to ride, particularly since you can only have one secondary effect active at a time per familiar. None of this is helped by all of the camera-wrangling and it leads to some frustration in sections where tight movement is required. It’s a good thing that dying simply respawns you at a checkpoint, since there is a tonne of trial-and-error platforming. I should also note the frequency of weird collision glitches – you can get stuck on ramps, rocks, and invisible walls, causing you to be teleported to the nearest checkpoint.

Unfortunately, this isn’t where the frustrations end with Skábma. While the environments are gorgeous, navigating through them to find the next story objective is incredibly difficult. Áilu’s drum provides inconsistent guidance (often leading you to an optional collectable rather than your goal) and the indistinct natural biomes are easy to get lost in. This is a frequent and critical problem. The first major roadblock comes in the form of a massive swamp, filled with vision-obscuring fog and mud-monsters. Man, f**k that swamp. You’re trying to find a path through deadly sinkholes, using the Bear familiar’s rock-making power to create safe platforms – only you can’t see the platforms, and they’re all slightly higher than your jump height from the ground meaning you need to time jumps perfectly or fall to your doom and go back to the start. Upon reaching what seems like the only path forward, you find a collectable and a dead end, forcing you to go back into the fog and start again. Maddening.