If You Like Minecraft, You’ll Like Valheim, and Here’s Why
According to Norse mythology, there are nine worlds, but IronGate AB presents Valheim, a tenth world to which Odin’s banished five monsters you’ll need to kill.
As I perused Steam’s October sale, I needed a game that was guaranteed to scratch my awful MMO itch, and Valheim struck me as ordinary enough to help. The combat’s competently straightforward and mundane, calling for little beyond the right gear.
While Valheim isn’t a brilliant test of dexterity or intellect, it’s far more immersive than its contemporaries, transforming grindy activities, like collecting wood for shelter, into tasks that require attention to detail and a touch of skill. I became complacent as I felled trees, and one of them killed me. Logs and their ultimate segments roll down hills into water. If they stray far enough from shore, they’re gone.
You can’t charge at a deer like Ratonhnhaké:ton and smack it because it’ll outrun you. You’ll have to sneak, which drains stamina, and aim high with your bow for the arrow to connect, which also drains stamina. You’ll have to gather the deer’s raw materials, build a spit above a fire, and roast the deer.
In Valheim, survival’s a realistic process, especially with regard to one of my favorite tasks: building. Gravity matters. You can’t build the floating dicks of Minecraft. Your buildings must be structurally sound. If your roof strays too far from the walls as you build, it’ll collapse. Being cold or wet ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) saps your stamina regeneration, while spending time next to a heat source offers a rest bonus to stamina regeneration, so you’ll need to address heat by building a hearth or a bonfire. You’ll take damage over time from smoke inhalation, so you’ll need to ventilate your house with a chimney or appropriate roof. Between your chests and your fire, you’ll need to make sure there’s enough space, as well. If you want to make your house aesthetically pleasing, that’ll be a huge exertion, even during the postgame. As one of the most novel game mechanics, building houses demonstrates a significant learning curve, but once I had the hang of it, building changed from a QWOPpy annoyance into an attractive enigma. Just. Like. Me.
Valheim’s bosses are basically destinations, but preparing for each is what made the game fun for me. You’ll have to fight through a barrow’s animated skeletons to locate bosses. A boss might be across an ocean, and you’ll have to build a sailboat. If the wind’s against you, you’ll have to settle for the much slower option of rowing. When you arrive at a boss’s altar, you’ll need to figure out how to summon the boss, and you’ll need to make sure you have the correct tier of weapons and armor before the fight starts. Finally, you’ll spam arrows at the boss and move onto the next exciting tier of materials. Beating bosses in Valheim is like advancing an age in an RTS game. As a newcomer, I had a lot of fun learning about the cool stuff I could make after killing bosses.
Another novel element in the game, which I think is clever, is that the production of food is central to your performance. Without food, you have 25 units of health and 50 units of stamina. For all intents and purposes, this is worthless, but you’ll have access to “red” food, which increases mostly maximum health, “yellow” food, which increases mostly maximum stamina, and “silver” food, which does a bit of both. All types of foods increase health regeneration. You can use up to three food effects at a time, and you can mix food types however you want. You can eat two red foods and a yellow food or two yellow foods and a red food. My personal suggestion is that Valheim doesn’t lend itself to specialization, so any strategy that emphasizes balance is probably the best. No spoilers about the best food items in the game, but I eat one of each type. As the game progresses, you’ll graduate to better foods within each type, quadrupling otherwise dangerously low stamina and health maxima. Food effects last from twenty minutes to a half-an-hour in real time. You’ll need to maintain a dependable stash of food in your house, but you’ll also have to discern which foods are too high-maintenance to make, and you’ll want to eat foods whose effects expire at the same time. If a game gives you 10,000 of something, it probably wants you to use those 10,000 things.
While Valheim doesn’t have great performance, the graphics aren’t at fault. What I immediately thought was a brilliant decision was the use of simple and pixelated, yet beautiful graphics. View distance is solid, distant game objects are blurry to minimize lagging, and you can tell what’s what. I ask for nothing more from an excellent game. What I’d thought would be an unlikely contender, Valheim enters my personal annals of the best games ever.
