Management are delirious to learn that Christopher Livingston can keep working long after his death and will take draugr entrails as payment!
This is an Early Access preview of a game that’s still in active development and updating. Originally released in June 2020, we feel safe casting an eye over where Valheim has been, where it is and where it’s going…
Our first trip across the ocean was on a tiny wooden raft, holding a torch nervously, peering through the pitch-black night. It makes you feel intensely vulnerable. Having never left the starter island before, we have no idea what’s waiting out there in Valheim’s massive procedurally generated world. After a long, tense night of sailing, finally setting foot on a new continent, we immediately discover what looks like a village. That’s a surprise – we hadn’t know there were villages in Valheim. The village is full of draugrs. We didn’t know there were draugrs, either. This game is full of surprises. Don’t ask about the trees…
A mob of undead warriors bash us with axes and bombard us with arrows. Fleeing home in misery, we have little to show for hours of exploration save for badly degraded weapons and armour, and a few draugr entrails. We decide never to go back there. Ever. But the discovery of draugr intestines has given us a recipe for sausages, so we stuff the entrails with boar meat and flavour them with thistle. Then eat them, eyes widening as the health bar grows to twice the size it’s ever been.
In Valheim, you’re a dead Viking warrior. Your soul has been deposited in the afterlife so you can battle the enemies of Odin, powerful creatures such as a towering giant made from tree trunks and a toxic swamp blob that emits great clouds of poison.
But before you can do Odin’s work, you’ve got to do dozens of hours of your own labour: building a home, making weapons and gear, levelling up skills, unlocking crafting recipes, and slowly exploring deeper and deeper into the huge, dangerous world. It may not sound all that different from other open-world survival sandboxes, but Valheim is an utterly engrossing experience that blends thoughtfully designed survival systems with exciting RPG-like adventures, where each small nugget of progress sets the stage for the next.
Odin’s blood
The sausages are a good example. Unlike most survival games, you won’t starve to death in Valheim if you don’t eat, but you absolutely need to eat. The right foods dramatically boost your t
