The Subtext of the Review is I'm Single Now
A Long Form Review of the Game "Valheim"
by ex_mortis

I have some acquaintances who don't believe you're allowed to "negatively" review a game if you have a thousand hours in it. You're actually uniquely qualified to do so.

Valheim is a game that was in early access for a decade or something. I don't think that's factually correct but new games journalism is all about feelings. It's been a period of time that feels like my entire "adult life," being in Colorado, finishing college for no reason (at an advanced age), figuring out I want "being gay" to be part of my identity. When the game first appeared it was a shockingly compelling survival experience, the first one since Minecraft that grabbed me. Now that it's finally "done" it's... well, it's done.

Valheim is a game about being a viking. A dead viking, I guess, I think you're in some kind of pre-Valhalla purgatory which (at first) just looks a lot like meadows and forests you'd expect to see in ancient northern Europe. It looks very nice! The level of polygon fidelity is about 20 years "out of date" but it's combined with a really smart use of lighting and color that gives every biome and every time of day its own character. Exploring is thrilling. Coming across graves, abandoned shacks, signs that someone has been here before you. Running in the dark from sounds you've never heard before. Gradually discovering new ingredients for food, armor, house parts, etc. Exploring is thrilling... for a while. The process of playing the game to completion far outlasts any novelty Valheim has to offer.

A large part of the process is colonizing the world with your own base, a bed, storage, circles of light in the darkness. The core "thing" of building is that there's a rudimentary sort of physics simulation and your structures have to support themselves. By material and gravitational necessity you start building small shacks but as you tame more of the world you can start raising huge castles. The act of construction is very satisfying and as a domestic simulation Valheim is unparalleled. There are some nights you just want to build a cool evil churchy looking castle in a dark forest and sit on a stone throne in there in front of a big bonfire while the moon beams through the window. If, Odin willing, you're playing with a romantic partner it's incredibly fulfilling to build a house together. One Fourth of July I went to great lengths to arrange a ten minute fireworks display set to Illuminati's "Thunder Among The Lilies" (an album recorded in 1991 but only recently released digitally). Sitting on a blanket on the lawn while your partner launches fireworks from behind the hill down towards the beach doesn't get you any closer to Valhalla. In the game. I think maybe it actually IS Valhalla, like, in real life.

The music in the game is trash. When it launched in early access I turned the music off almost immediately. On the full release I gave it a few more hours and just kept remarking "wow, this is bad." More evocative of "Weather Channel" than "dead viking." Cornball shit. The general audio design as far as ambient and creature sounds is quite strong. The overall atmosphere makes it a great game for listening to your own music and the two will elevate each other frequently. Gazing out your tower window at pines blowing in a torrential downpour to Rainbow's "Temple of the King." Sailing down a precarious canyon river in a thunderstorm to Icehouse's "Man of Colours." Discovering a weird field of swaying roots to Susumu Hirasawa's "Siren." Slaying a dragon to Beast in Black's "Die by the Blade." "Genuine" viking bands like Wardruna make a vastly more appropriate general purpose soundtrack. So if you're willing to put in a lot of extra work, Valheim's music is the best in the biz.

The combat in Valheim is basically lifted from Dark Souls, fighting your stamina meter as much as the foes. Your ability to block, parry, and outlast all sort of ramp up on the same gradient as basebuilding and everything else. As you push further into the wilderness you're always meeting new creatures you have to figure out and overcome your fear of. The trolls in the Black Forest are the first powerful "combat moment" you'll probably encounter: big blue naked guys five times your size capable of tearing down mighty pines with their attacks, just easy enough to run away from unless you're already exhausted, very satisfying to grow to defeat. Sadly very few other non-boss creatures live up to the troll's lofty example. One is the sea serpent. When you first set out into the open ocean you're thinking "there's got to be something out here" and indeed there is this massive bioluminescent snake that will tear your boat to shreds. Gives you something to plan for, evokes dread, a cause for jubilation when you finally harpoon it and drag it ashore and hack it to chunks. Like the trolls it eventually becomes sort of rote and ignorable. The "feeling of wonder" ramp doesn't keep up with the overall strength growth ramp.

The straight line progression through the game takes so long, things become so remote and dangerous, that the core risk-reward exploration mechanics put forth in the first release simply do not function in the full finished game. The player becomes jaded and potential wide-eyed "troll moments" become through-gritted-teeth "christ, this fucker again." For the first chunk of the game, the initial release chunk, learning how to craft new stuff that made you stronger occurred at a very natural, pleasing pace. In every post launch update that ramp has been stilted, gated behind obsure sets of prerequisites that mean when you finally do discover the keystone ingredient so many new potential items pop up you can't possibly mentally register them.

When they introduced the first new biome, the Mistlands, my group spent several nights trying futilely to get a foothold without an iota of reassurance from the game. Aesthetically the mistlands are very strong, a craggy oversaturated deep purple and green nightmare which has had Stephen King's The Mist (2007 [film]) planted on top of it. But every terrifying new bug conquered, every weird new plant and stone discovered offered no succor of increased player strength. Turns out you have to find TEN rare black cores (highly randomization dependent) inside dungeons (again, even finding these is highly randomization dependent) to then craft the thing that lets you craft the thing that you have to build a stupid cage around so it doesn't spray your base with destructive magical energy fueled by the sap that you farmed by killing the seemingly friendly dwarves in the area (a new and exciting concept, the first "friends" you've encountered in purgatory, you did kill them right?) which will then break down the ancient brains you've been mining out of giant petrified skeletons (you found that right? you did that?) and FINALLY out the other end comes the thing on which all crafting now hinges. Absolutely fucking ridiculous.

The final two chunks of game they released, Ashlands and Deep North, have this exact same pacing problem. The experience of the Ashlands is almost a parody of the Mistlands ("you thought THAT was bad? watch THIS"). In replaying the full game from the start I realized the Ashlands is basically an uninspired recolor and cock-and-ball-torture crank up of the Swamps from earlier in the game: a largely flat, shitty area where you're constantly harassed by zombies and the environment. Throughout the game you're always expanding your storage of wood, stone, monster parts, fruits, meats, and whatever other junk you pick up and might some day need. By the time you reach the Ashlands all your chests are filled to capacity and you really have no choice but to just make a new chest labeled "ASHLANDS BULLSHIT" because every enemy drops like six different kinds of crap and almost none of it has a well-defined purpose. The entire crafting experience of the biome revolves around the zone's new type of metal and the skin of a fat alligator that lives near lava. Hope the Ashlands you found has these things, the first one I found didn't! The same thing happens in the Deep North: you're roaming around without really knowing what you're looking for because nothing you find makes a new recipe pop up. This time it's been done "very intentionally," because for the first time in the game the recipes themselves have to randomly drop. At least it's a new idea, but it's not good at all in practice.

The long fabled final zone, the Deep North, is in some ways a triumph and in others a letdown. The biggest relief is that its difficulty level paradoxically returns to the pre-Mistlands "totally reasonable." You've long since conquered the cold because after a certain point every possible set of clothing resists frost. The new accumulating snow mechanic is completely toothless. There's a new troll thats like five times bigger than the old troll, it's pretty cool! There's northern lights! You can just kind of peacefully explore! It's just not really well done in a survival game sense. The aforementioned progress gate of arbitrary individual gear unlocks combined with really no kind of new environmental risk at all means you're just kind of going through the motions. And you'll be going through the motions for a good long while, because the final step of the game has you travelling to random points across the entire world. The act of trying to sail the fuck around at this point without cheating really hammers home how much of a ludicrous mistake it was for them to say "1.0 will not feature any new changes to the ocean biome." I think in a way they knew how fucked the game had become without utilizing dev commands because at 1.0 launch a character who had "cheated" was totally ineligible for achievements... but they almost immediately backpedaled on this restriction. At least the last boss is decent!

So I don't know what happened. Did some staff change at the company behind the game, between wildly successful initial launch and years upon years of obligation filling? Everything that was "added" to the game is so wildly misbegotten it can't have been planned in any original design document. Mechanics like losing all your gear on death and having to run back to your corpse, like being unable to carry metals through portals so you have to load down a ship and make a risky long trip back to base, stuff like that stops making sense once the entire too-big-for-its-own-good world has been populated with "content." Magic was introduced post launch but it comes into the game SO late and you gain magic skill SO slowly I can't imagine taking the time to grind it up to where it's worth using full time (it's basically a necessity against the boss of the Ashlands though, a dragon who fills the area with so much damaging crap at such a relentless rate the most torturous bosses of Dark Souls 3 would blush). Bows become completely useless and don't even recover when they're replaced with crossbows (another alternate skill you need to grind), which is unfortunate because ON LAUNCH the act of getting good at archery was one of the most rewarding parts of the game. The breadth of the game hinted at by the first half belies the depth present in the final product.

I think Valheim only really "works" as a multiplayer experience, whether you're fucking your fellow vikings on the side or not, and even then only as a simultaneous multiplayer experience. While you have the "option" of running a dedicated server people can hop on and off of, the "never repopulates on its own" nature of the game is antithetical to asynchronous world play. Maybe as like a competition thing if everyone agrees to set out in a different direction?? I dunno. As a solo experience the game goes so long that the domestic aspect becomes a burden, that you begin to resent having to main "Axe" because you need an axe to chop wood anyway so why not just make that your weapon as well, that long sailing trips become tedious and lonely, that there's no one to laugh when you try to steer your boat under the bridge you made and end up crashing into it. So many of my "core memories" of the game hinge on other people and for various reasons (busy in late stage capitalism, don't like me anymore, etc) no one could "make it" to my full playthrough. I think there's magic in Valheim but it's not in the whole of the game; it's in its intermittent aesthetic triumphs, and it's in the power the game has as an engine to strengthen existing relationships.

7/10.