Early access games like Valheim are a funny thing.
Valheim was released into early access on February 2nd, 2021. The Valheim team is just five people. Astoundingly, Valheim was the 5th most played game on Steam for a while.
And at $20 a pop, and 5,000,000 sold, that’s $100,000,000 gross. That’s $20,000,000 for each designer, and so this team can afford to keep working on this project for a long time to come.
To me the strength of this game is that the player selects their own pace: The game releases the player into a meadow, gives you the first quest, and encourages you to just figure out the world. There are only five total quests in the game, and none of them are in any way urgent.
You probably think Valheim is about vikings, but I would contend that Valheim is perhaps closer to a neanderthal simulator. You begin with just your hands and the world around you. You find some rocks, and some old branches, and you make a stone axe. The stone axe lets you clear some of the underbrush, which makes it easier to forage berries and mushrooms. Now that you’ve got food, you can try to domesticate some wild pigs, or maybe if you’re lucky you can sneak up on a deer if you can get downwind of them. In time, you can use the deer and boar parts to make a crude bow, which makes hunting a little easier. But at the end of each day, you want to get home before the monsters come out. You basically don’t need to fight, unless you stay up too late.
The game gives you a lovely half-hour cycle of watching a (frankly beautiful) sunrise, waking up in your primitive campsite, and deciding what you’re going to do that day. Are you going to go foraging? Work on your house? Maybe build a fence around your pigs? The day is yours, and whatever you do, you’ll feel like you progressed in the twenty minutes you have until you watch a beautiful sunset.
And then the next day, you get to do it again.
Over time, you get to repeat similar cycles in woods so thick with trees that you won’t see the sun. You’ll learn to tame the woodlands and bring light to them. You get to wander cold mountains and maybe train a wolf into your new best friend. Maybe you’ll meet and tame some buffalo-like creatures as you start a farm in the plains.
I’ve spent an embarrassing number of hours with Valheim so far. And I can see where the game isn’t quite done yet. I’m very excited to see what it offers next, as the game leaves early access, because I already love it.
Further reading:
Valheim’s biggest secret? Trusting the player, Jennifer Scheurle, Polygon.
Valheim: Running Naked in the Woods, Me.
