What’s Valheim, the Viking game that’s blowing up on Steam?

Viking game Valheim is a survival sandbox experience that tore up the steam sales charts. Since its launch on February 2 Valheim was at the top of the list of best sellers, and has an “overwhelmingly positive” rating with nearly 13,000 reviews. This great game has a small download and looks like a 3D game from old school games like Runescape.

So, what exactly is Valheim, and why is it declining so fast?

Action and adventure with friends

Valheim‘s progress is very similar to Terraria or Starbound, in that promotion feel organic and natural. Players start in a simple but expansive meadow and learn how to hunt animals and build simple shelters. Players learn to kill small pebbles and create a club. From there, players can start building a starting lineup. Once done, it’s time to start hunting pigs, dropping the material for a bow, making hunting deer easier. There is a clear progression, with each step opening the next progress.

Eventually, my friends and I feel confident in the basics, so we investigate. We find a good elk boss and fight against it, dropping hard antlers – now I can use it to make a pickaxe. This means that the more dangerous Black Forest is now worth exploring, as we can mine the ore in it. Once we have that ore, I can make more sophisticated tools and weapons, which in turn open up their own recipes and options for promotion.

Image: Iron Gate / Coffee Stain Games

Here’s what a session with my regular gang of friends might look like. We want to go to the Black Forest to fight a giant duck, but there is a mountain range in our way. The mountains are freezing, but we see wolves, and we think we can take their fur with us. After a few unsuccessful pieces with wolves, we mark the spot on the map and promise to come back another day and take revenge.

We head south and travel through the mountains until we encounter a massive lake that we cannot possibly cross on our own. Instead, we sit down and build a wooden dock and a Viking longship. The longship drives us across the lake and we track down and then attack the end and circle around the giant tree with bows and spears. It fights back by summoning massive roots and tearing us apart with giant vines.

The battle goes well until the end calls dozens of goblins out of the wood, so we flee in panic and lose our longship in the process. We found no treasure, but on the way back my husband sang sea break while my buddy took the steering wheel and navigated our way home. We laugh and chat among ourselves, enriched by the adventure.

As we explore, the world opens up to the outside world, leading to mechanics such as building trade routes, establishing a magical portal network, and learning how to navigate and chart a voyage. Valheim feel like a world worth exploring and spending time on, especially since I do not have to put in a lot of time to maintain the progress I have made.

The models are simple, in pixel-shaped and polygonal, but are evoked by beautiful shadows and lighting. It is a balance between modern amenities and old-fashioned nostalgia. Of course, hunting habits and fighting roles are great, but sometimes I just sit on a raft and watch the watershed against the shore, or the sun grazing through trees in a meadow. It is a cottage and deeply cozy, and occasionally a fierce storm makes the bright and sunny days even more attractive.

Image: Iron Gate / Coffee Stain Games

A Viking’s life

Craft and survival games often involve a rough start and a bitter grind before players can have the sweet experience of building massive bases, hunting down dangerous bosses, and conquering a hostile world. Even survival game success stories like Rust went back to making things easier and more accessible for new players.

Valheimon the other hand is $ 20 and very accessible. Players take on the role of Vikings granted by Odin himself an eternal afterlife. One of Odin’s crows appears to provide tutorials, and the game spreads tools slowly you get the basics of transformation, farming, fighting, bosses and crafting. You can not get too deep without understanding your starting tools, and this leads to a good drive to the game. Fortunately, you do not have to cut down trees for a long time to earn wood before you can get the right action.

I only encountered minor errors in the game for 20 minutes. I can play with up to nine friends, and it’s very simple to connect to another person’s server. I can even connect a controller without any problems. These are small achievements, but they are also problems that triple even A-games Dropout 76 struggled with implementation, so it’s a big relief to dodge that kind of whole mess.

Image: Iron Gate / Coffee Stain Games

The game is also mechanically forgiving, without any of the usual survival game obstacles such as food decay or unpaid repair and expansion costs. There are tools for manipulating sites and a building system that allows players to build extensive structures and sprawling settlements. Building can be a bit tricky, but players can loosen wood, or click pieces together, depending on their preference, resulting in something mostly easy and flexible. PvP is a link; unless I sign up, I do not have to worry about another player destroying my house or dropping an ax in my back while I farm.

Games like Rust or Fall out 76 have built large communities around their survival playing field, but they have also left other players in the cold with difficult design decisions meant to increase problems, or technical problems. Valheim do nothing new or out there, but it does not have to. Iron Gate has created a simple yet deep game that works on every level, and it’s enough to blow up on Steam.

In short, this is an indie game for early access and survival that is actually work. There is nothing ridiculously flashy or completely new, but developer Iron Gate has created a solid base. All the mechanics here have been done before in games like Ark or Conan Ballinge, but the hard edges and the frustrating grind were abraded and smoothed. In a genre so crowded with derivative, opaque and downright broken titles, Valheim stand out by simply working well and making sense.