Valheim Early Impressions

As is likely to happen, every so often a game comes from out of nowhere and takes the zeitgeist by a storm. One of those happening right now seems to be Valheim, a small indie survival game based on Norse mythology that has entered steam early access. Currently the game is $20 and based on the press I had seen about it, I decided to poke my head in. I have to say Valheim is charming in a way that most games in the survival genre are not, and it is very hard to put my finger on why. In many ways it reminds me of games like Outward that in turn remind me of my early experiences in MMORPGs like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

The game sits in this really odd place of being both beautiful, and also a little rough around the edges. Take for example the character models. They are blocky and brutish and remind me more than a little bit of the faceless poppets from Ashen. I went with my standard beardymans look and ventured forth into the world not fully understanding what I was getting myself into. One of the interesting things about the game is that it works both as a single player adventure as well as giving you the ability to host your own server session or rent a permanent server space. Additionally your one character can span multiple worlds, so that when you feel like you have tapped out the resources in one… you can just move yourself along to a brand new randomized world.

The intro to the game shows you being carried into Valheim in the clutch of a giant raven. This seems very reminiscent to the opening sequence of Demon’s Souls. The key difference being you are effectively being carried by one of the messengers of Odin the all-father given his connection in lore to the raven. In fact Huginn serves as your guide to the world, and each time you encounter something new he shows up to teach you some lesson about how to utilize this thing. That said the game really does not do much in the way of hand holding at all, and you are effectively left to your own devices to sort things out. Shortly after the crow sequence the following text plays out on screen effectively explaining the games setting.

Long ago, the all-father Odin united the worlds. He threw down his foes and cast them into the tenth world, then split the boughs that held their prison to the world-tree, and left it to drift unanchored, a place of exile…

For centuries, this world slumbered uneasily. But it did not die… As glacial ages passed, kingdoms rose and fell out of sight of the gods.

When Odin heard his enemies were growing once again in strength, he looked to Midgard and sent his Valkyries to scour the battlefields for the greatest of their warriors. Dead to the world, they would be born again… In Valheim.

From here it plays out a lot like Rust or Ark where you start by punching trees and foraging berries and eventually build up to making proper tools and weapons that allow you to explore a little more safely. There are hostile animals as well as little forest Trog looking things called Greylings. They will randomly decide to come after you and also have the habit of coming around and messing with your stuff, pending there is anything worth messing with. One of the first missions of the game seems to be finding shelter, given that the nights can get very cold and if you stay cold for too long you start to take damage.

This was my very first “base” which ended up as a crudely assembled long house with a dirt floor and a few objects like a bed and a workbench. This served me well for awhile and more than likely I would have been just fine keeping this up. Knowing what I know now however, the Island you start on is dotted with ruined shelters that could very quickly be repaired to a pretty comfortable state much faster than going about building your own thing. On future islands I am probably going to seek one of these out as my starting base of operations. Instead I built a structure where you spawn in and have just been exploring out each day from that location.

There are interesting aspects of the game, like cooking for example requires you to stay by the fire and listen for the thing you are cooking to change the way it is sizzling. This reminds me a bit of the way that cooking in the Monster Hunter games works, in that you have a brief window of “doneness” that you have to harvest the item before it is charred beyond recognition. Side note however this is how you get charcoal that I believe you will need in the future for other things. I have a cooking rack over my fire which allows me to cook two slabs of meat at a time. I also have a number of bee hives that supposedly will allow me to start making mead… but I have yet to properly figure that one out yet.

My activity for last night was to build a proper house, which you can see in the last two images, the inside and the outside. I had to put fences around my bee hives because over night I could hear greylings messing with them. They got too close and aggravated the bees, which drove them away but I don’t want them to be able to break them. Finding a queen bee is enough of a challenge that I don’t want to lose one. As far as where I am going now… I am not exactly sure. For the time being I seem to be out of aspirational goals, so I think now is the time when I am supposed to fight the first boss. That is the other aspect of the game that is interesting is it apparently has bosses and dungeons. Neither of which I’ve actually encountered as of yet.

I did however get what I think is the boss to summon hordes of monsters to come attack me. This is ultimately why I put the row of spikes around the outside of my building, to try and double up the layers and hopefully be able to fend off and attack if I needed to duck inside and wait it out. The entire attack seemed to only last for a specific amount of time and I am guessing these are going to happen at a fairly regular interval until I defeat the boss. I have no clue HOW to summon the boss however and I have gone to the location where it is marked on my map and found nothing. So this means I am likely going to do some research and try and figure out what I need to do to move forward.

Regardless, I think one of the things that makes this game so relaxing is the soundtrack. It has one that is not dissimilar to that of Minecraft which at least during the day leads to a relaxing sort of vibe as you wander the forest looking for resources. Are you also playing Valheim? Drop me a line with your thoughts.