Why I Keep Playing: Valheim

This is the new line of more positive critical analysis I'm starting, looking at a game I like and taking a deeper look at some of the points as to why I like it. It's really the sort of stuff I should have been doing this whole time, I just got a target fixation with movie content and, well, trust me, I can make this as funny, while also being analytical about something I actually want to look at. Enjoy! -G

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Why I Keep Playing

Valheim

[Steel Collar Man Intro]

This is the opening sequence to Steel Collar Man, a failed TV pilot that aired of the year of my birth. Beyond the patent ridiculousness of pretty much everything you’re seeing here, it is also noticeable for starring Charles Rocket, a member of Saturday Night Live who was quickly fired for dropping the f-bomb on a live broadcast.

Under no circumstances are we going to be watching this show. My want to review filmed media on this website, at least in video format, is done and gone for now, because frankly? It’s just a headache, of running on a treadmill and making adjustments, only for the whole thing to have to be cancelled before it even gets off the ground. Hence why I’m showing you Steel Collar Man: this awful thing has been indicative of my state of mind at work this past little while, trying in futility to do the Seagal thing, only for the whole thing to be abruptly cancelled.

[SEE THE SMOKING REMAINS OF WHAT I HAD ON PATREON!]

Which is when the simple thought hit me: Why don’t I make videos about the stuff I do to blow off steam when I’m stuck and stressed out? You know, the stuff that can eat your entire day like that, when you’re like me, and your anxiety comorbidities read like the mixing instructions for a particularly elaborate cocktail. The games you play when you’re locked into the absurdities of this fake world of paper, forms and red tape, and you just find yourself saying ‘you know what, screw it, let’s just go be vikings.”

[TITLE DROP]

Valheim is the product of the scrappy, creative, capable folks at Iron Gate, and published through Coffee Stain. The best and easiest framework that it fits into is that it’s an open world building and survival game, with light RPG elements and simple-but-very-functional combat. I could liken it to Minecraft, but I won’t, simply because I kinda bounced off Minecraft like buckshot against hardened steel. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it, and I respect the really neat things people can do with it, such as Turing-complete code execution via in-world physical objects and Subversion of Fascistic Governments By Promoting the Free Flow of Information Online; it just didn’t jibe with me, and I mostly found myself saying stuff like “oh hey, neat” whenever one of the cooler big projects made game news- respect of creation from afar.

Instead I chose to go into Valheim through the eyes of someone that was expecting to be able to halt his game of Skyrim at any time, so as to settle down and play a nice game of Cities: Skylines instead. In that sense, it’s kinda accurate, but also kinda not. For one, Valheim moves and controls infinitely better than Skyrim, with player mass being significant, real and apparent in how you move, but also with a forgiving amount of jump height and air control. So in other words, as long as you hold the sprint button down, it’s really more akin to playing a Boomer Shooter, with how much you truck around and how high you can leap.

But also unlike Skyrim, the world of Valheim is almost completely unpopulated by other people- if you’re playing solo, you can count the friendly faces you’ll see in your gameplay time on one hand, though the devs are working to change that. But regardless, the feeling is more of a distinctly deep wilderness than most fantasy games, a vibe of being dropped off (literally, check out this dope Valkyrie depositing your Einherjar avatar into the afterlife) in the midst of pristine nowhere, to be left to your own devices and do as the Gods will you to: Make a home in Untamed Valheim, the newly uncovered 10th World of Yggdrasil.

By the way, see that branch up there? That’s Yggdrasil. Try not to look at a lot of stuff in this game for too long, it may actually cause sanity loss. Not in your character, mind, I mean you.

[I - I’M ALREADY DEAD AND THIS SHIT IS STILL SCARY]

It is important to note that by very definition of who you are and what you are in Valheim, that death isn’t that much of a problem. You are Einherjar, a warrior of the Gods plucked from death on a mortal battlefield to serve as a divine instrument- dying is something you wake up from the next morning. You might be sore after this happens, but you’re fine.

And yet, this is a game that will make your fight/flight/freeze response kick in so frequently, there’s times it can feel like you’re playing a horror game. Now part of this is because at this moment in Valheim’s early access life, death still comes with the hefty penalty of you dropping everything you had on your person, and that can be a big, big fucking loss depending where you are in the game. Don’t worry, they’re doing a thing about that-

[Difficulty mode update buzzing from the update notes, cheers and salutes]

But the biggest part of this comes from Valheim’s astonishing atmosphere, which portrays a world that can range from being idyllic in how absolutely sylvan everything is, a place where even the regular colours somehow seem extra pretty, somehow, to a world that rapidly becomes a descent into an unknown hellscape of both natural and unnatural origins. See the first biome, the Meadows? Absolutely beautiful, the sort of place you’d want to put a home up in, and you will, because it’s absolutely the smart choice to make your base in the Meadows: it’s completely nonthreatening, save for the boars and the graylings that wander around the thicker woods to be a nuisance toward you. In some cases a tasty nuisance.

[crafting sausages “I GOT GLIZZIES, FUCK YA LIFE”]

But as you progress and begin to make your babysteps outward into your greater Viking conquest, you’ll come across the next viable biome for you to explore, the Black Forest. Honestly, in terms of vibe, it’s a little more foreboding than Meadows, but it’s also beautiful and wild, and like the name would suggest, it gets dark in here really fast, because Valheim’s world lighting is no joke and will create extremely realistic forest shadows that simply becomes a contiguous darkness. Look, see? Knock these trees down, the light comes in.

And now I’m going to practice aforestation, because that’s the right thing to do.

Where was I? Oh yeah, atmosphere, right. So Valheim’s setting this mood of you being in a slightly dark and dangerous place, and it’s doing it so subtly, that you find yourself beginning to underestimate it. Like sure, straggling greylings have turned into packs of their full-grown form, the greydwarves, and they know how to throw rocks now. That’s not much, but it’s something to ratchet up the tension. Then suddenly, a ruined tower- you move to investigate, only to find that it’s being crewed by Spooky Scary Skeletons, who attempt to send both shivers and arrows down your spine. Depending on how early you are into your exploration of this biome, you might be able to handle them- they can hit hard early on, but they’re also bones, and they don’t like it when you get a blunt instrument and go bonk-bonk on the head.

[Greydwarves around a spawner]

You look at that shit, far off in the fog and think: “oh no, are they worshipping that?”

And that’s when one of these, somehow very quietly, lumbers up on you.

[Another goddamned troll]

Well that sure put some grey in beard the first time I saw that. You might ask: hey when you’re new to this biome, is this a winnable fight? The answer to that question is:

[5SecondFilms Planking: NOOOOOOOOO!!!]

You might be able to wear it down with flint arrows, so long as you brought ammo, but in terms of trying to stand and bang with the Big Blue Bastard, you’re so far out of your punching weight, you might as well be fighting 4-elementally themed Butterbeans.

But there is a common refrain in Valheim: if you can sustain yourself, then you will prevail. Building your home lets you also build up your ability to build and craft. The better the gear you fashion for yourself, the more you’ll be able to endure, persist against and triumph over the hostile world. Suddenly, what were once frantic guerilla warfare encounters with an overwhelming foe, becomes a scene out of one of the better Wolverine movies.

[Assorted Hugh Jackman BWWAAAGLRRRRAGAAARRRGH HHHAUGH noises]

Yeah go have a match with Omos, you blue raspberry jabroni, I want that belt.

[MEGINGJORD: You feel stronger.]

But just as you triumph, the cycle so repeats: because welcome to the Swamp, where the atmosphere grows more oppressive, there is no choice to proceed onward while wet because of the constant rain, into a darkness you have not yet faced in this game. It’s haunting the first time you stumble into the swamp, because you aren’t ready for how tangibly miserable this place is. I don’t even want to make the requisite Souls comparison to the toxic marshes in those games, because the dread this place evokes just feels so much more earned from the vibe alone. This shit’s like if Silent Hill was in Louisiana.

This is backed up by the now ever-present danger that this place represents. The Black Forest gave you moments to breathe, places where you could see very clearly where the threat was coming from. In the Swamp, you have to stop and think clearly about what’s around you, because danger could be literally anywhere. You’ve got to think about how much of this ever-present shallow water you want to cross. Not because it’s poisonous, but because the giant leeches in it are. You’ve got to beware these standing stones, because even though they have treasure at the center of them, they also have enemy spawners, and the Draugr of the Swamp pack a major punch while also being creepy as all fuck. They also like to patrol, and are very, very quiet while they do this, right up until the moment they aren’t. Hey look, burning swamp gas, and around that burning swamp gas: fragments of Surt’s immortal and seething wrath, shaped as tiny simulacra of him. Great. Cool. Awesome. Kill them with axeblows. Drown them alive. Make them not exist any more, you horrible fire children. You think you’ve got this place down, even if the tension in the atmosphere is wearying you.

Then an Abomination rises out of the ground, and that whole fight/flight/freeze response thing kicks in again. Because what is this? What made this? Who is to blame for this?

[The awful quadruped spider made of dead trees lets out a hideous chuckle]

It laughs, and I assume it’s because it delights in its own agony, somehow.

You want to know what’s disconcerting? When you fight an enemy head on, and it turns to face away from you… and then continues to fight like it was, demonstrating to you that not only does it have no head, it has no need of one. It’s moments like this that I’m glad the chuckling frankentree has the very logical weakness of ‘axe.’ Because at the very least, it, like everything else in the game, drops something useful that you can use to build into something more pleasant.

[II - HAPPY LITTLE VIKING COLONIES]

It seems strange to frontload this video with a rundown of how oppressive and frightening this crafting and building game can be, but follow with me: Fear and Wonder are the opposing sides of a coin, but it’s a coin that can be made to land on the Wonder side pretty consistently as long as it falls on a stable foundation.

Welcome to a Stable Foundation: Valheim’s excellent building component, and the means through which you make that coin land with the Wonder side up. The first thing you’re going to notice here, is that Valheim doesn’t subscribe to the notion that ancient cultures were devoid of colour or craft, making sure you have decoration options at the ready from near to the jump. The game’s colour palette is bright and lively to begin with, but it doesn’t just leave you hanging to exist in what some Triple A executive thought the European Iron Age looked like, which is most likely a series of browns and greys where people wear mud coloured clothing and don’t wash their faces, ever. No, no, look! Actual colours!

[Hang a banner]

The snapping and modularity of the building pieces feel as though they’re as if Erector set girders snapped together like Lego bricks, and even if it can be a little finicky to get things to snap how you want them, it’s satisfying when it works properly. Once snapped together, you can start throwing down rugs, furniture, banners and more to start sprucing up your home. Even if you’re just working in wood, you can make a place that looks great, because the basic pieces the game gives you straight from the outset are designed to teach you how everything snaps together. You can build a framework, add floors, walls and a properly angled roof. And note when I said properly angled, I mean it- until you get the ability to cap over a structure in stone or make actual shingles, you’re going to be working with thatched roofing, which means it either works on these angles, or it doesn’t work at all, you can’t just build another wooden floor overhead and call it a day, because like in real life, that shit’s gonna leak if you do that.

Beyond that is the matter of heat: you can’t go to sleep in Valheim without a fire nearby. Naturally this seems pretty simple to solve: that’s fine, just build a campfire outside, light it up, and go to sleep. Except oops, then the storm rolls in and you can’t get to sleep on this dark and stormy night. Clearly there has to be a better way- clearly, you just leave a patch of your floor open, bring the campfire inside, light it up and, well, okay, this is great, now we’re suffocating, perfect, cool, AWESOME. Yeah that’s right folks, this game simulates the flow of smoke from any structures that might generate it, from simple campfires, to bigger hearths, to braziers, to these fuckin awesome looking things [Blast Furnaces]. This means you have to be mindful of how you keep the heat built into your house- keep it outside, it can go out from exposure, unless you build it an enclosure with a cap. But if you’re going to do that, then why not just be clever and build a chimney? Or do as the actual vikings did, we think, and just make the fire the centerpiece of your home, the smoke allowed to drift up into the rafters and out the open ports in the ceiling? If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, you’ll begin to suffocate, and also, the fire will go out because it suffocates too. Neat!

Beyond both the building and the decorating, Valheim features a whole suite of homesteading activities that really nail home the fact that you’re a stranger making a home in a new place. It’s a full plate of things to do: farming, mining, refining, crafting, sailing, fishing, cooking, brewing, violence. Each of these feeds into each other. You start the game on a generously sized starting island, but eventually, you’re going to find the edges of where you can walk to- eventually you’re going to have to take to the sea to continue your exploration of the world. You can do that with a raft, which can be had early on in the game, but this is inadvisable for doing anything other than going up and down rivers. The Ocean is a large place, full of the enormous asshole spawn of Jormungandr, who like to come out at night or during storms to test the integrity of your hull. This is a bad situation to be in when you’re floating on a series of logs layered over each other and lashed together, and it’s best to just avoid it altogether by building the humble but mighty Karve instead. It’s a higher tech-level item that you’ll have to wait a little bit for, but it’s worth it. It’s significantly faster and more durable than a raft, meaning that it’ll make serpents have to actually chase you when you’ve got the wind at your back, and even then, it’s durable enough to take more than a couple of whacks from them. Just all-around more oceanworthy, up until you get the even bigger and faster Longboat, which is just a goddamned pleasure to sail with.

[SOME PEOPLE STAND IN THE DARRRRKNESS, AFRAID TO STEP INTO THE LIIIIIIIIGHT]

The process of making the Karve is a series of organic pressures that gives you a set of objectives without a single mark in a quest log. You need fine wood, bronze nails, resin and deer leather to make the thing. The resin and the leather are relatively simple, with resin being available by chopping down both trees and greylings, and the deer leather available from hunting deer. The fine wood and the nails, however, are where the quibbles come in. See fine wood lives in Birch trees, and beyond them being rarer than the ubiquitous Beeches that exist everywhere in the Meadows that yield basic wood, they can’t be chopped down unless you have a proper metal axe. How do you get a metal axe? Make one out of bronze, by mining both copper and tin. How do you get a pickaxe to mine with? Beat the boss monster of the Meadows, and make your first one out of its harder-than-stone antlers. Bingo, got that, so go get that ore, and bring it back to base.

Wait, hang on, you got hungry in the midst of this, and that’s fine, you won’t die, but your health and your stamina pools will suffer. That’s fine, it’s an excuse to do some cooking, and engage in this game’s interesting means of both portraying survival elements with a character that is canonically immortal, as well as advancing your RPG stats. See, Valheim does have a skill system, and it’s what I’d call basic, functional and organic- do a thing enough, the number goes up, and as the number goes up, you either get better at doing the thing, spend less stamina doing the thing, or both. But for health and stamina, things go in an interesting: simply put, your level is what you eat. The higher the quality food you can cook, by being able to exploit your current biome, or through mastery of prior ones, the more health and stamina you’ll gain to your meters when you eat. These buffs last a significantly long period of time, enough that you don’t constantly have to be poking at your character’s inventory to get lunch ready, but it’s enough pressure to make you slow down, stop and do other activities for a while, rather than forging wildly ahead. You can’t constantly raid, you’re going to need to refill the pantry- without food, you’re going to have to fight on an empty stomach, and that’s just a nonstarter, even for an Einherjar.

Okay, lunch is over, got it, where were we? Right, the ore. Smelt it in your smelter- you make those with Surtling Cores, which can be found in a number of places, but firstly in these Burial Vaults in the Black Forest. You take the bars and you alloy them, and bingo, you got bronze- make enough bronze, and you can make an axe (and also the nails you’ll need). Take that axe, and put it to work- now you’ve got fine lumber. Now you’ve got your Karve- mission accomplished. The way to the Ocean is open to you now, be you brave enough to sail it. The World is Yours.

[Viking Scarface looks out across the water at his boat]

Nothing in the game will tell you to do that, at least not explicitly. Huginn, one of Odin’s ravens and a very good boy, will pop up from time to time to give you hints and context clues of what to do when you get a new thing, but ultimately, the entire game works of the organic logic of wanting to expand and make your stuff better. It gives you the tools to explore and travel, then plants the idea in your head that the thing that’s better than what you have right now, is just beyond that one particular part of the horizon you haven’t sailed beyond yet. And I can’t say if that’s the true viking spirit or not, because I’ve never met a real viking that was alive at the time, but what I can say, is that it speaks to the adventuresome ideals of what we think of that lies beyond the darkness of their baldfaced ruthlessness and brutality.

Speaking of brutality!

[III - SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE (LIKE AN AXE THROUGH THE BRAINCASE)]

Like I said, I don’t know a lot about Minecraft, but one of the things I do know about the game, that even the people that like it will bring up about it, is that the combat is flaily and something that really needs you to make your own fun out of. Again, not going to knock it, I don’t know enough firsthand to confirm this, but from what little I did play, if there’s hidden tech in the basic fighting in Minecraft, I wasn’t finding it.

Which brings me to the combat of Valheim, which I can describe with two words: “simple” and “ferocious”. Valheim is a game of basic two or three hit combos and strong attacks with long windups, and that is the start and end of a weapon’s movelist. Valheim is also a game with a poise meter, a dodge-roll with some very active and deliberate invulnerability frames, and one of the most vicious parries I’ve seen since fucking Metal Gear Rising. The mechanic is simple: time your block with an appropriate weapon or shield just as an enemy hits you to instead blow their attack aside with a satisfying thundercrash of a sound effect, instantly breaking the enemy’s Poise. This will send them into a long stun animation, which will not only persist after you start wailing on the enemy, but also, every hit will land for double damage, allowing you to, conservatively speaking, gut your foes alive. Yes, this works even if you parry an enemy projectile. Does that make sense? No. Does it rule? Yes. Every fucking time, it rules.

[Parry a Skeleton’s arrow, break a Skeleton’s head]

This parry, combined with very satisfying archery combat and even some surprisingly functional grenades, all work in tandem with a gradually deepening arsenal of weapons to provide a combat experience that isn’t as involved as a lot of other full blown action RPGs, but is also one that’s more well realized. Like the weight in the movement, there’s weight in the combat, and you really feel it when you’re using a heavier weapon versus a lighter and quicker one. There’s a Stamina meter that drains with sprinting, jumping and attacking, but thankfully not with blocking, and the rate of expenditure and recharge varies depends whether or not the game sees you as being properly rested, or if you’re wet from having either taking a swim or getting rained on, and this gives you pressure to not just swing wildly, because not only can you catch your breath while blocking, but a series of ripostes delivered to a stance-broken enemy can end an encounter in a matter of seconds, if not a literal second. When you’re tired and surrounded by foes in a midnight thunderstorm, and this can happen, being able to drop an enemy with a single brutal blow where it might normally take more counts for a lot. Beyond that, there’s nothing quite like throwing an enemy onto its heels, then knocking it 10 meters backwards with a single shot from your magic silver frost hammer.

[OH MY SHOULDAH]

And satisfaction is part of why we play games. It’s why I keep playing Valheim.

[Credits]