We are thrilled to announce that YouTube reviewer, podcaster, all-round video game news guru, and big time Legacy of Kain fan Ralph Panebianco (AKA Skill Up) will be writing the foreword to our Book of Nosgoth encyclopedia.

We have been fans of his channel for a long time: no week is complete without getting our news roundup from This Week In Videogames. We've also worked with Skill Up many times over the past year with sponsorships on his videos promoting our various books and projects. You may even be here on this very page thanks to his most recent shout-outs of our Legacy of Kain campaign!

We asked Ralph for some words on what Legacy of Kain means to him, and why we chose him to write the foreword pages to our encyclopedia:

“Kain is deified…”

I still vividly remember the very first time I heard these words. It was immediately after setting up our brand-new PlayStation. One of my brothers had elected to get the PlayStation as a birthday present after it became clear that the four-controller port limit on the Nintendo 64 was an insurmountable problem (there were, after all, five brothers). 

Fresh off playing and replaying The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time half a dozen times, it’s unsurprising that the first game we popped into the disc drive would be one that, we thought, would be fairly analogous. Here was Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, another 3D action-adventure game in a fantasy setting with a focus on melee combat and puzzle solving through an interconnected world. 

But what’s this…music? This curiously named Ozar Midrashim?  Why does its dirge bury its way into my psyche? And what’s this? The characters all have voices I can hear, and they use words I don’t yet fully understand at 15 years old, but I can still sense their meaning through the theatre of it all. And what’s all this blood, all these demonic visages, these ruined palisades and palaces that coil and uncoil as I move between realities? 

There was something here that was both like and unlike anything I had ever experienced before, and with these few opening words, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver ushered me into a new chapter of my relationship to videogames, one that would eventually lead me to where I am today. I was so honored, then, when Lost in Cult asked me to play a very small part in this project, and I really do look forward to the moment when we all get to see and experience what they’ve been working on because if there’s one series that deserves the Lost in Cult treatment, it’s this one. 

- Ralph Panebianco (AKA, Skill Up)