Survival games are definitely 'my thing' and I'd been reading someone's toots on Mastodon about Valheim, and all the weird and wonderful things this person had done with the game. So on paper it sounded fantastic, almost too good to be true and as soon as the price dropped on Steam I was all over it.
That was...sheesh...122 hours ago. Or more accurately, around 2 months ago. It's fair to say that this game has its hooks in me in a way that Roadcraft did before, but for an entirely different reason. With Roadcraft your goals were pretty much set out at the start of each level - and you knew what to do to achieve them. In Valheim, survival a la Minecraft-style grinding is very much the flavour, but I don't think I've ever 'met' a game as grindy as Valheim. Put it this way, if it had its own profile on Grindr I would not be a bit surprised.
So what is it? It's a game with a fair dose of Nordic mythos woven into it. You're dropped as a hapless near naked human into an unforgiving game world, forced to scrape in the mud for sticks and stones to build your first few weapons and tools, and to slaughter innocent (and not so innocent) animals to feed your empty belly (man, nor woman, can live on berries alone but you can sure as hell try!)
Soon you discover that you can do the same thing to your dropzone that the Vikings did to Iceland, and busy yourself with your own little deforestation project, stripping the land of its trees and shrubs in order to build yourself a home, a fire, and hopefully some workbenches and other accoutrements to begin levelling up.
 |
| Oh shit... |
My first few (OK, my first DOZEN) attempts to do this met with dismal failure because I tried to walk before I could run. As much as I loved the idea of grinding away, I got too impatient and went out looking for fights with inappropriate weapons, or worse still, basic weapons that hadn't been enhanced - and very quickly found that because of the game's rather neat balance of energy vs food slots vs your ability to knock the shit out of something, I got my ass handed to me again, and again, and again - often embarrassingly by some real low-end creatures (one time I had just defeated an ogre for the first time, only to have an angry wild boar that had been tagging on my coat tails finish me off at the last minute).
The steam deck is an expensive piece of kit so I resisted throwing it across the room but I swear I ground my teeth down to stumps the first time, the tenth time and indeed all subsequent times something like that happened.
But reader, I persisted - and currently am still alive with a fairly impressive wealth of goodies at my disposal, and the ability to take on those big blue bastards, the trolls - and even bears, which both put the fear of Odin into me in previous attempts to reign supreme.
Of course these minor bit-players aren't the real ones to fear. The game has several bosses, all of which are double-hard bastards, mentally imbalanced enough to seemingly take great glee in stomping you into the ground, stripping you of all your hard-won weaponry, armour and other bits and bobs. Getting your stuff back isn't as straightforward as it sounds either - because when you die, and your glowing grave sits taunting you on the map (quite often the OTHER FUCKING SIDE OF THE MAP if you're an idiot and don't plan ahead), it's not always easy to make your way back to it to retrieve everything you dropped (at least, unlike Minecraft, you're not forced to root around in the dirt to find each individual piece, but if you're carrying anything you might lose a few bits when you attempt to pick up your glowing vest of embarrassment).
 |
| A sailing we will go. Very slowly. |
The game consists of several biomes, ranging from the calm and serene meadows, through to the inky blackness of the Black Forest, then into the real nastiness of the swamps and freezing bitter cold of icy mountains. The game rigidly ensures that you stay within your boundaries though. Get cocky and try to take a walk on the snowy mountains before you've levelled up your clothing and you'll freeze to death, or get eaten by wolves (who are, so far, the hardest wandering characters I've encountered in the game). So it's back to grinding again until you get enough bits to build your first level 5 benches to work up some nice warm clobber on.
Ships feature in the game - at first nothing more than a crappy raft which is the slowest damned thing to try and traverse an ocean with (It took me 40 minutes last night just to get to a distant shore, and the whole time I was paranoid the damned thing would pitch me into the sea, kill me, and force me to lose all my stuff AGAIN).
Rage-fuelled gaming isn't good for the soul and I have sworn, and done myself actual physical harm when the game has been at its cruellest. Yet I persist, like Khan chasing Kirk through a distant nebula in a clapped out old ship. Yeah the analogy is not lost on me, this game tasks me, it really tasks me.
But last night I polished off the second big bad - the Elder, a fearsome boss who shoots nasty looking black roots all over the place, and acts like a vehement Treebeard until you are dead. Thankfully the game engine is interesting enough to allow for "Cheesing" - what Valheim players do when they want a swift end to such bossfights. My method was to dig a fucking huge pit under the dias where the Elder spawns, and hide under there shooting flaming arrows at the old bastard until he burned and died. It took about an hour all told, but it was very satisfying at the end. Until of course Valheim did what it does best, instantly dropping my exhausted self into a massive fight with a bunch of swamp-dwellers and skeletons. Yeah, thanks for that! Insta death AGAIN!.
But I managed to wait until the foul stench from the swamp abated, retrieved my stuff (including the Elder's head) and cashed it in at the required altar to gain the awesome (actually quite shit) powers of the Elder. Again, something else Valheim does a lot - disappoints you in terms of upgrades.
BUT friends, spoiler alert, if you want to win this game, kill a few bears, get the bear claws, level those suckers up as much as you can and you'll be practically invincible in any fight (even against bears themselves). Forget all the brass weapons, they're mostly shite. Bear claws is where it's at.
Valheim is available for multiple platforms, but maybe play it with a joypad you don't mind pinging off the wall in anger.
Comments
Post a Comment